Time to start work on the skate (see what I did there?)
There are a number of jobs I had cobbled together into something you might call a list in my head:
- My understanding was that it is easiest to remove the rear hubs on the mk2.5 so you can remove the brake shields, the ABS rings (unless you’re keeping it) and drill the hole for the wing stays (this understanding turned out to be entirely incorrect – see below)
- I had acquired for a sensible price (from none other than rocketeer) an acid dipped and galvanised front subframe which needs swapping in
- With a galvanised front and having already powder coated the wishbones, it makes sense to get the rear subframe blasted and coated too while it’s accessible
- Power steering needed refurbing and possibly depowering
- New clutch
- General cleaning and tidying
The engine itself has had a good service less than 20k miles ago by me (cam belt, water pump, seals, plugs etc) so while a general tidy may be done it’s not needed. I also plan to turbo at some point in the near future so it may be worth doing some work while it’s out or conversely not doing the work since I can do it when the turbo is fitted… jury’s still out.
I started by pulling the gearbox since the clutch needed changing and the engine needed to come off to swap the subframes. Oil drained, prop shaft removed, PPF disconnected from the gearbox, slave cylinder and started motor disconnected, then a handful of gearbox bolts and it pulled free. Piece of cake.
I’d jumped back and forward between the front (above) and the back of the skate. At the rear end I have removed the brakes, undone the hub bolts and been alternating between spraying copious amounts of penetrating fluid and mercilessly hitting the bloody thing with a hammer to try and remove the hubs. After at least half a week of this (and one incident with a slight diversion of the hammers trajectory towards my unsuspecting thumb), I decided it wasn’t worth it and another way would be found.
And found it was. I pontificated on the problem and decided that while the hammer had indeed wronged me, that with the addition of a small chisel could do even more damage, or better yet tap a splice in the thin metal of the brake shield. And that’s exactly what it did. With that, and a bit of brute force bending it to get it off around the drive shaft, both sides were soon removed.
A similar process was applied to the abs ring, but alas these were a bit more tough. The rotary tool with a small cutting disk so as not to nick the upright was successful however. No bending this time so two cuts were made, one either side of the ring, and the two pieces fell off.
I’d also removed the oil from the rear differential.
Bear with me with the technical jargon here. The donor car is a mk2.5 MX5 sport and as such has the Fuji differential. These are good limited slip differentials when they work but suffer from a fatal weakness, the clutch plates that they use are prone to… what’s an appropriate descriptor… shattering. Exploding would probably be a bit too dramatic.
I guess by now you can see where this is going… the diff has a magnetic drain plug which when I removed it to empty it of the oil, found this, a big piece of clutch plate. While not the end of the world, I have seen much worse, it made me thinking about bringing forward the longer term plan. Knowing the weakness in these diffs I have heard about an engineering company in Ireland who have come up with a novel fix for them, just send the diff off to them and they’ll send it back working again, and for a reasonable price.
After all that I managed to remove the remainder of the suspension from the rear end, leaving the subframe ready to send off to the powder coaters, as well as getting the engine removed from the front end and onto an engine stand.