Pushing the Lotus Cortina off of the trailer and into the garage the previous Sunday hadn't been difficult, but hadn't exactly been easy either. It was evident that some of the brakes were partly stuck on and my visit to the garage this morning had revealed that two of the tyres had gone soft as well.
So, I jacked the car up, got it on axle stands and removed the wheels. The wheels are all genuine Lotus '881A' steels, so that's good. Not so good is that they have fifty year old Dunlop 175x13 tyres on, so they will be removed at a later date when I have the wheels refurbished.
I then removed the front brake callipers and was happy to find that theses were the correct 'P16' and 'front facing' type as well. I also checked the struts while I was at it and was pleased to find that these are the correct 39cm struts as opposed to standard 41cm Cortina struts. (A lot of Lotus Cortina's were robbed of their 'sporty and upgraded bits' back in the day, so I wanted to check if anything was missing)
I then moved onto the rear brakes and found that these were a bit more challenging. None of the brake pipes to the wheel cylinders wanted to come undone, so it was a case of cutting the brake pipes to release the fluid and then using a hammer to knock the brake drums off. Once again, I found that the rear drums and shoes were the correct type for the car.
While I was underneath the car and already very dirty, I decided to remove the exhaust. This needed a bit of brute force in the form of hammers and an angle grinder and promptly disintegrated while I was attacking it. In fact, it left so much rust on the floor, that when I picked up my spanners, their silhouette remained!
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