Last week, I whined that when I bought the ’69 Lotus Elan +2 a few months after I’d bought the FrankenThirty, the former kicked the latter out of the garage, which not only forces the E30 to sit outside over the winter (hey, ratty rebuilt-salvage E30; the world will go on) but also made it difficult to get the car back in the garage, even for short periods, to work on. Yeah, I know, first-world problems. Sometimes, I really do overthink things, and last week was a good example. While my driveway does slope downhill, making it challenging in winter for non-snow-tire cars to get a foothold, and while substantial snowfalls cause the cars in the garage to get snowed in, sometimes for weeks, neither of these events was in play. We’re currently in a period where cold but clear weather is forecast for a week, so simply turning the key and firing up the Lotus Europa (ignoring the imagined screams of its engine components slugging through the honey-viscous 20W50 oil), backing it out of the garage, and sticking the E30 in for a little work isn’t, to mix a metaphor, rocket surgery.
Not coincidentally, I saw that Scott Sturdy, the wonderful fellow who runs our favorite event, The Vintage, in Ashville, Ohio, opened up registration for it on New Year’s Day. This year’s Vintage is the weekend of May 17th, a little earlier than in the past. Plus, this year, hell has apparently frozen over because the event is now open to E36s (this is a by-product of the event’s location at Hot Springs having been decimated by the flooding last summer and the new venue at the Hendersonville Airport being large enough to expand the event to 600 cars). As I’ve done for years, as soon as I saw the announcement, I grabbed a hotel room at The Clarion Inn before they all sold out and registered for the event. I instantly felt gladdened having The Vintage to look forward to. Plus, as I mentioned last week, I’d been thinking about making the trip in the FrankenThirty, and if I’m going to do so, I want to resurrect the car’s air conditioning. So these two things together, having a date for The Vintage on the calendar and seeing a week of clear weather forecast, made me wake up on Friday morning, move the stray cars out of the driveway, back the Europa out of the garage, and drive the E30 in. Last week, I wrapped myself around the axle of the issue of wanting to put the E30 on the mid-rise lift, which meant moving two cars instead of one. Part of this desire was because I needed to drop the a/c compressor to change the lubricant, and part was because I also wanted to replace the E30’s rusty muffler, which is almost certain to blow out on a long drive. Instead, I decided to keep it simple—if I just drove the nose of the E30 up onto the pair of plastic ramps I have, I’d have all the under-engine access I needed. Having the mid-rise lift in the garage, I don’t regularly use the ramps, but this was a perfect application for them. I can leave the exhaust for another day.
Yes, I know I can’t use the ramps to pull the front wheels off to mount those new tires.
I’d actually started the a/c rejuvenation before I cleaned out the car’s mouse-infested heater box back in late September. The first thing you do with a dormant, non-functional a/c system is see if it’s leaking. When you do this, you find that, of course, it’s leaking—in most instances, that’s why it’s non-functional. But still, you want to get a sense of whether it can hold any pressure at all (small leaks may be from o-rings) or whether it has gaping leaks that immediately cause all refrigerant or pressurized air to spill out and are likely due to a failed component. I’d hooked my manifold gauges up to the service ports and found no pressure at all, so I connected my nitrogen tank and let it flow in. When I did, I immediately heard it all hissing out from somewhere in the front of the car. I went to lower the pressure on the regulator on the bottle, but the regulator appeared to have broken since I last used it. I closed the nitrogen valve, put the rig away, decided to leave the question of pressure testing for another day, disconnected the hoses from the evaporator core, pulled the core out, and proceeded to clean the heater box, which was the far more pressing issue anyway. I discovered that despite scrubbing the evaporator core with enzyme-based cleaner (three times and rinsing three times), it still never passed the smell test; there was too much residual mouse detritus embedded deep in the fins.
The evaporator core and expansion valve removal last September.
I sourced a good used evaporator core (well, I hope it’s good), flushed it with mineral spirits, screwed dust caps into the ports, and slid it into the heater box. Again, this was all back in September. At the time, I left the expansion valve off the evaporator core because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to replace it or not, and capped the ends of the hose fittings to keep dirt out of them.
There’s supposed to be an expansion valve there, but I haven’t reinstalled it yet.
I mention this because I came right up against the same issue when I was about to undo the hoses to the compressor fittings. That is, I thought that maybe I should first do a pressure test so I know where the system is leaking and know what I need to order before I begin pulling things apart. The work I did in September came back to me. I stopped and began dropping the glove box so I could have access to the evaporator core so I could install an expansion valve so I could close the system back up to pressure-test it. Then I realized that I’d never fixed the regulator on the nitrogen tank. So I again abandoned the idea of trying to pressure-test and had at the compressor removal instead.
It was out in about 20 minutes. Having the nose of the car on ramps worked perfectly. I had access under the hood to undo the hose fittings and access under the nose to unbolt the compressor from its bracket on the block. I didn’t even need to undo the fan belt to get the compressor belt past it because the compressor belt was missing. It’s quite possible that the a/c was never reconnected when the car went through its accident-salvage-rebuild event in 1992, which turned it into the FrankenThirty that it remains today. I then covered the ends of the hoses with baggies and rubber bands, backed the E30 off the ramps, returned it to the driveway, and stowed the Lotus back in the garage. Sorry, E30 fans. You set your priorities, and I’ll set mine. (Seriously, this car sat outside for years before I bought it in September. I’m not defiling a pristine car.)
Likely the original compressor.
With the compressor removed, I looked into the inlet and outlet ports. I see some dirt, but nothing that looks like it seized and puked its guts. And the hub on the front is neither loose nor binding, just spinning freely as it should.
So, I feel like I’ve begun the a/c rejuvenation. The basic approach will be to drain the oil out of the compressor, refill it with the proper amount of fresh oil (there’s no dipstick or other measuring device to check compressor oil level), source a new receiver-drier, flush the hoses and the condenser, put the system back together with new o-rings, pressure-test it, and see if there are leaks before I make any further decisions or purchases.
Three or four dozen of these pieces, and I’ll have a cold car ready for a road trip.
—Rob Siegel
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