In our never ending pursuit to find and stop the oil leaks in the lovely Lotus cars we work on, I recently found an answer to one of the many puzzles that cause leaks - the dipstick. I have always used the process of slipping an old spark plug boot over the dipstick and down over the dipstick tube. This has usually done an OK job. But recently, whilst stripping down an Elan project car, I found another way. Slipped over the dipstick in such a manner that it would work like a cork in the dipstick tube was a short length of rubber tube, tapered down like the shape of a cork. When you slide the dipstick all the way down, the rubber would cork up the end of the tube, thus keeping the oil residue from weeping or blowing out of the hole. So now I use the little rubber plug fabricated out of a piece of used fuel line AND the spark plug boot. One leak fixed, on to the next.
