Another update.... I know Isettas are not rare microcars but as not much else is going on with the forum at present I thought I would keep the updates going, It may be helpful to anyone else restoring an Isetta, besides, I have always thought what was lacking from this forum was tech chat, all we seem to talk about is ebay, values and ID'ing pictures!
Slack in the steering. I found the source of this problem on my car, it was the two bushes that the steering shaft runs in under the front of the car. There is a short length of tubing welded to the chassis with a fossi bronze bush pressed into each end. The guy I got the car from assured me that it was fine when he "restored" the car so why was it total shot after only one hundred miles of driving? I discovered the answer yesterday afternoon whilst striping it down, upon removal I saw that the bushes and shaft had been cut and scored to ribbons by grit left over from when the chassis had been grit blasted! Something to remember with all car restorations, grit blasting is great but can be a disaster if you don't make sure its all cleaned up before you start adding grease and moving parts to it, the grit sticks to the grease which makes very course grinding paste! What made this worse in my case was that the grit appears to magnetically stick to the moving parts,I kept flushing the parts with degreaser and some of the particles would just not let go! The medium must have been cold iron or something. Oh well, more expense! Still, there is no going back now, and I'm still hoping to be running around in it before the summer ends. The lesson I'm learning here is that you just cant trust someone elses "restoring", there is no substitute for doing it yourself!
