This is my first fall/winter with my Elise, and I've become so attached to driving it that I can't keep the little guy in the garage for several months until the weather gets warm enough again. I finally realized that it's only the tires that are a real problem -- I have the Yokos on, and below 40 degrees, they become plastic(y) and lose a lot of their grip. So I bought some new tires and rims, which arrived today, and I changed myself. I practiced on my Mini Cooper on Monday (I've been swapping the all-seasons for Blizzaks for the last couple of years -- love the in-snow handling), and changed the Elise's tires just a few hours ago.
Gotta say, it was considerably easier to change the wheels on the Lotus. For a start, you can jack up two wheels at a time. And unlike the Mini, the suspension did't sag once up on the jack (I sometimes think the Lotus doesn't have suspension!), so you only need to get the wheels a couple of inches free from the ground. The wheels are lighter, too -- on the Mini, an S-Lite (17" solid alloy) + a run-flat tire weighs in at 44 lbs each, what came off the Lotus only weighed 30/37 lbs (16" front/17" rear), and what I put on was 30/34 lbs.
Okay, on to the pics:
My new wheels. FedEx didn't deliver until about 5:30pm -- thought they weren't going to deliver at all -- I was stressing!
Those are Kumho Ecsta ASX rubber on TRMotorsport F1 BLK MA LP rims, from TireRack.
Chock the wheels, handbrake on, break the lugs, check for the little blue sticker (missing on mine, but find where the cross-bar meets the side bar, and you are pretty much golden), and jack:
After some wrench work, and a little careful lifting (don't want to hit the brake calipers), the wheels are on:
Here's a bit of a comparison between the all-seasons (going on), and the summers (coming off):
You can just make out the size difference between the front and rear wheels. The tires in the back-ground are the 17" all-seasons off my Mini -- and despite being the same size (in theory) as the rear Lotus wheels, they look small in comparison -- probaby because the Lotus wheels are wider???
Finally, here's a little look at the tools I used:
You can see I marked on the torque settings for both the Mini (M) and Lotus (L). My jack has just a simple metal top to it, which is fine for the Mini, as it has big rubber jack-points permanently fitted to it, but my Lotus didn't even have the bloody blue sticker. From diagrams on the 'net, I figured out the jack point, and with a little Dremmel work, I tooled a rubber furniture cup into a gentle cushion between the Lotus and the jack. Finally, the jack only just fitted under the car, and I noticed that if I wasn't careful, the jack arm/handle would touch the body-work, so I put a piece of stick-on felt onto the handle for that extra safety margin.
Hope you found this interesting and/or helpful.
If you are interested, I can let you know how the new tires fare once I've broken them in.
Anyone else going to be driving their Lotus through the off-season?
Cheers,
Mark.
:-)