What did you do to your E-Type today? (Part 1)

a trick is too coat the inside of the wires with some sealant to prevent the hub grease from coming through and messing up your hard work.

Thanks for the tip, Michael!

“Lilly”, “LIL E” very clever. You must be a rithmeticican :wink:

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Paul - Thanks for the suggestion. I probably should have just ordered a replacement valve, spring and spider when I ordered the rest of the parts, but those three items all looked healthy. But as you point out, they might not be. So, question back to you: how would you recommend pinching off the return hose? Its a pretty thick hose. I could see putting a C-clamp on it and tightening down, but I wonder if that would crack the hose. (I also thought about putting a cork in it, but I expect that a cork wouldn’t hold too well inside an oily rubber hose.) Maybe I sacrifice the hose for the benefit of science and replace it once the experiment is done?

Thanks,

Bob

Hi Scott,
Try Macquires chrome wheel cleaner. Spray on and rinse off, very little scrubbing. It took maybe 10 or 15 minutes a wheel.
I was sold on this stuff years ago when I cleaned the back side of the original wheels on my FHC. I don’t think they had been touched before. The bonus was there was no rust under the grease & grime.
Ed

Thanks, Ed! I’ll give that a try. There is fair amount of surface rust on the spokes so I might still need a bit of steel wool, but maybe not.

Try Naval Jelly instead of wool. Brush on with a toothbrush and let stew for about ten minutes, agitate with the brush some more and rinse off. I never put steel wool on chrome, not even 000 stuff. A coating of wax will fill in the flaws and keep more rust from forming.

Scott, I could be wrong, but my recollection is that rust on the spokes can affect their strength quite a lot by the pitting caused by the rust. Not sure I fully understand the engineering but it made sense. You may want to look into it

Thanks, all, for the excellent suggestions.

I cleaned my original wire wheels with 0000 steel wool and baby oil and they looked great. John Blake cleaned them when he put on my tires a couple of years ago and they looked even better. Now I use that spray on chrome wheel cleaner and hose and dry it off with a soft towel.

–Drew

PO decided to prevent rust by leaving naval jelly on the wires. Needless to say there was no rust, nor chrome.

There are special clamp-off pliers made, to do it: if a c-clamp breaks the hose… it needed replacing.

Flat-jaw Vice grips, not too tightly applied, will work, too.

My spider looked perfect, with only the barest shiny bit on one side of the sealing surface. I could measure no wear.

Put a new one on, and, BOOM! OP went to perfect.

The LED lights are da BOMB!

Instant on, no more humming, and WAY longer-lived.

2 Likes

I’ve been swapping all of my bulbs out for LEDs over the last few years. I think they’re getting tricky in learning how to make them poorly so that they fail more often than the old incandescent ones. Seems like I’m always fiddling with the ones in the garage flickering and half going out.

I am glad I am not the only one that was thinking that.

I’m finding the same thing with some household LEDs. On the box it says they’re guaranteed to last 10 years but many don’t go beyond a year or two of normal use before they go dim and die. No problem. All you’ve got to do is wrap it up well, put it in a box along with the original receipt, pay the post office $10 to deliver it to the manufacturer and they’ll gladly send you back the replacement that you can buy at the hardware store for $2.

Seven more weeks till I take my E-type out of winter storage. All I did to my E-type today is miss it.

1 Like

Odd; I’ve never had an LED bulb, be it a globe or a 4-footer, yet die: some of my globes are on the order of 4-5 years old, and the 4-footers, to be fair, are only a year old.

Stay tuned…what did I do to my e Type?

Looked at a picture of it!

Indeed: I was an early adopter, wrt to LEDs. I’ve got the cheaper ones in some fixtures, and naturally, IDed at to age and install date.,

We’ll see…:wink:

I put two of these up in my 25’ by 20’ shop and they provide more than enough light.

–Drew

I put one of those over my workbench… best quality light Ive ever had there!

1 Like