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1966 404 Coupé Injection Restoration


Mike T

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Well, the pause has been very good! 

I've had a chance to look more closely than I did before at the preparation of the internal engine parts.

Basically, I need to pull the block out of the car again, put it on the stand, and whip put the pistons and rods....because I did not change the connecting rod bolts.  I had read in a Peugeot service Bulletin many years ago that they were no longer recommending systematic replacement of rod bolts at engine reassembly because the rod bolts were knurled and mounting them in the rod would ever so slightly affect the position of the rod cap and therefore the bearing positioning, which is BAD.  That is correct, but the bulletin was from 1973....and my car is from 1966.

In 1966 (and probably up to 1970+) the 404 rods did NOT have knurling in them, but rather tight smooth sleeves to fit them in the rod holes.  So that Bulletin does not apply to an earlier 404.  Further, the workshop manual for the 404 KF2 states that the bolts and washers have to be changed systematically after every dismantling.  In other words, they are stretch bolts.

The good news is that I have a set of eight of them, new old stock, with new washers and nuts.  The bad news is it means a fair bit of new work.  But: better now than later!

In 1987 when I did a basic rebuild on another KF2 engine, I did not change the rod bolts IIRC but that was as I say a rather basic rebuild and even though it was driven hard for 100,000 more km and never seemed to have a problem, I'd rather do this engine 100% properly.

The eight top bolts in the photo are from a 404, NOS, and the bottom one is one of six (!) knurled ones I have from a later Peugeot engine, possibly a 504.

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I took the advantage of the current pause in work to clean the old door seals.  The new replicas available these days are too thick and press too hard against the doors when shut and because the rubber of the originals seems to be in decent condition, I thought I'd spend a few hours cleaning one up to see if my plan to reuse them would pay off....

 

Before:

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Before (inside the seal where the metal clips are placed):

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After:

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After (inside the seal where the metal clips are placed):

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Thanks to Jérôme Roussel in France for giving me 1.5 metres of metal clip strips, to replace the 1.5 metres of my originals that rusted to FeO2 powder in the 5 years these seals from 1975 were on the car, and the car on the road.  These will all be de-rusted and electroplated in Cadmium and painted, then reinserted into the seals.

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As I noted, the seals were bought by the previous owner in 1975 at Jay's British and European Motors - I still have the invoice - and they were on this daily driven car for five years.  After that the car was in a garage and so the rubber is truly in excellent condition.  Three hours or maybe a bit more with Flitz polish turned them from a rusted, dirty mess into what appears to be nearly new and very soft and supple rubber!

 

After a good wash with a nail brush, the cleaned seal was treated with this Würth stuff and wow did it make a huge difference!

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The door-mounted striker plates are not as good looking as they should be so they too will be replated when the seal clips are done.

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It seems that the spare connecting rod bolts I have are a bit too short so I'll be ordering a couple of sets from Europe shortly.

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So the rusty bits you see in the photos above are at the plating shop in Victoria now and I should get them in a couple of weeks.  Meanwhile I ordered some new Flitz polishing paste to rejuvenate the other door seal's rubber and remove the rust stains and white paint overspray.

I ordered 8 rod bolts (NOS) from Joern Haarmann and those should arrive in a couple of weeks.

The garage is full of old kids clothes right now and those need to be washed and donated before I'll have room enough to do anything much on the car!

I also need to buy a piston ring compressor sleeve to remount the pistons once the rod bolts are changed....

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 7/17/2021 at 9:43 PM, Mike T said:

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These are the wrong bolts; I got the correct ones today (below) from Joern Haarmann.  The precision-machined shank is  a lot longer on the correct ones than on the ones above.  This machining accurately locates the lower portion of the big end.  Some are advising me to not bother because none of these re-used rod bolts are known to have broken, but I will be changing them, so the engine is as close to new as possible.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Today I got a rebuilt Hydrovac booster from Todd Langton, Le Club 404's USA representative.  I'm the Canadian representative of the club but Todd has more stuff!  He bought this apparently unused NOS unit, which nevertheless had surface rust, several years ago, and had it rebuilt by White Post Restorations in Virginia in 2018.

The unit in my car was NOS in 1993 when I bought it, probably made around 1970, never rebuilt, but mounted on the car with brake fluid and all for 20 years.  I was pretty silly to think it would work after all these years.

When the engine is out in October I will remove the unit I bought in 1993 and install this one, and (I hope) successfully bleed the system before reinstalling the engine.

Rebuilt Hydrovac.jpeg

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  • 1 month later...

Got one of the two door seals done!  Original part from 1975 (replaced then) and will be installed to replace the ill-fitting modern replacements shortly.

Now I have to do the other side - clean the rust residue from the rubber then insert the plated clip strips.

Passenger door seal assembled.jpeg

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I finally got around to whipping the first piston out to do a conrod bolt swap and when I took it apart, the new bearing was scored and after having a close look at the big end journal, the culprit was a significant gouge on the freshly reground crank.  Good grief!

So the work was suspended (though I did change that rod's bolts) and the crank has to come out for at least a machine shop polish or maybe a regrind to 0.5 mm.  I'm glad I decided to take it apart because a gouge like this would probably lead to a rod knock after a while. 

I once had a Renault 12 with a knock (car cost $50) and when we changed the rod bearings, the big end of the knocking cylinder had been punched when the car was new at the factory.

I think I'll look for another place to do this second regrind....ugh1442905129_scorednew0.3mmbearing.thumb.jpeg.a48ee702fa3fd293906c5c2343bafbc2.jpeg341306165_damgedcrank.thumb.jpeg.cba8c85090d173838a35dc19cebf3741.jpeg

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It's hard to say but this looks to me who ever assembled the engine, when they pushed down the pistons the sharp edge on the connecting rod come in contact with the crank. That sucks, also i don't see any chamfering on the oil hole on the crank maybe very little from the factory, but from experience i'm chamfering mine to get more oil on the outside edges of the bearing. Look for a more experienced shop.

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That's the plan.  I've found a good candidate shop already.

The entire reassembly operation will be done here at home.  When I've rebuilt a 404 engine in the past, the open conrod bolts have been wrapped in tape to prevent just the sort of journal damage you see in the photo...

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Hall-effect, or magnetic effect ignition is a must on any old car, makes them usable, manly because the points today are so low quality, also 2-40-year old distributors do wear out. Check your distributor for wear, electric ignitions are much more powerful in the spark department and have better control in the timing advance. I did convert my little niva to Hall-effect, in fact that kit is so cheap many people are taking them apart to convert the other 4 cylinder engines to electric ignition. I paid 55$ for that kit everything you see on the picture. Parts are cheap for the russian cars.

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Rod bolts are changed, and I installed the two original door seals.  The doors sit better now when closed but still are a bit too "tight" against the seal, so the issue is the thickness of the interior door panels I made, so I'll redo them as a mini-project once the car's on the road.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Tapped out the new liners from the block because now I am reduced to second-guessing the shop's every move.  They did have some weird black sealant goop on parts of them which makes me glad I whipped them out again.  Will re-check protrusion without the rubber seals and then reinstall sans goop.

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  • 2 months later...

Cleaned the goop off the liners and will have to do it to the block soon.

Removed the flywheel from the crank, ordered another set of 0.3 mm oversize bearings from Dean Hunter in case the crank does not actually need a regrind.

Monday it goes into Mid-Island Engines and Machine Shop in Duncan, along with a set of 0.5 mm oversized rod bearings (the 0.3 set is en route as of Friday), the 4 rods with pistons attached so Chuck in the shop can check the roundness of the big ends....

It seems that Coachwerks, who restored my bodyshell and recommended Anderson's, is now using the shop my crank's going to. I suppose we both experienced some issues at roughly the same time.

Chuck warned me that it could be a while because his main machinist is working intermittently and he may have to do the work himself. It'd be nice to get it back at the end of February.

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  • 1 month later...

Got to get the brake hydraulics sorted now during the wait. If they're done, and I connected everything well, it'll be ready. Then the road trials begin. I'm sure there will be lots of fine tuning needed.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My 1966 404C restoration is stalled right now for two reasons: the second machine shop has the crank for a refinish after the first shop literally made a hash of it, and I cannot for the life of me get the brakes to bleed.

On the brakes, here is the background: new master cylinder, newly rebuilt brake cylinders (the car has the Hydrovac booster, rebuilt), all new rubber brake lines, rear brake proportioning valve unique to the C model (limits pressure peaks) is the old one but not leaking, and most importantly I think, I remade all the brake lines in Cunifer tubing, 3/16". Cunifer is a copper-nickel-iron alloy in case you haven't heard of it. The original brake lines are steel.

So, one small detail also is that the original hard brake lines have UNF imperial sized threads but 10 mm heads. I could not source these over here in Canada so I used the same UNF threading with a 3/8" head, which is about 9.5 mm.

So, using the original brake lines as a template, I bent up a complete set of lines for the car, and made the ends with a good quality hydraulic flaring tool.

When first installing the lines, I used a 10 mm brake pipe wrench to tighten them and therefore wasn't able to get them tight enough to seal without the wrench rounding the nut head. Remembering the size difference, I got an imperial sized pipe wrench and cranked them tight.

I first tried to bleed them with the original, unrebuilt Hydrovac booster in place, using a Pela oil extractor pump to provide 30 lbs of vacuum to suck air out of the lines starting with the RR wheel etc (LHD car). I could not get a clean bleed, with an airy froth coming out. Blaming the old Hydrovac, which was NOS in 1993 and probably suffering from 20 years of being on the essentially unused car, I bought a rebuilt one from a friend in Boston USA.

Before installing it and going through the same thing, I decided to remove the old Hydrovac and connect the hose from the master cylinder directly to the distribution lines, to make sure I could get a clean bleed first, to eliminate any possibility that the Hydrovac would be the cause. Well, even after tightening and retightening every line, it's still frothing and there is "no pedal" if you know what I mean, the lines are sucking in air all over, so it seems. With no pedal, I can't pressurise the system to see where the leaks are.

In hindsight, here's the thing that didn't seem right: with the original lines and fittings, they behaved like normal bolts, being relatively easy to turn until the very end. With the ones I made, they got rather stiff as they tightened, to the point that I really had to wail on them to get them fully home, and even then I doubt that some are actually tight. I wonder if the new threading is actually correct...

I still have the original brake lines, but they're 56 years old and probably are rusty inside (I could clean them out with acid I suppose!), but one of them was broken when disassembling the car - a short one connecting the two front brake cylinders. But I'd rather use all new stuff.

With the engine still on the stand, it's easy enough to get under the car an replace everything again, so if I can identify what on earth is the issue, which is why I'm posting this, that would let me make new lines or use different fittings or whatever the actual issue is.1047625541_Brakelineends4.thumb.jpeg.a65d3216464a4b0e628608185b5eb9b8.jpeg831555737_Brakelineends3.thumb.jpeg.9671774c8a50d8dc9f33da364a187e4e.jpeg1376197953_Brakelineends2.thumb.jpeg.8eb1659b66015a2bc7062bd6db9dd960.jpeg409856709_Brakelineends1.thumb.jpeg.dbe7420c4a519e25d8879f43a4aba1d1.jpeg

Here are some photos of the ends of an original brake line and one I made, so maybe any errors in the shape of the fitting or whatever can be identified. Any advice or tips will be gratefully received.

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Have you verified the thread dimensions with calipers and a thread gauge? If be curious if the OD was maybe slightly larger with the new fittings.  Would you have the matching tap to chase the female sides?  Or can you make one out of an extra fitting?

As for bleeding - Do you know anyone with a Motive brake bleeder?  It attaches to the reservoir cap and basically provides brake fluid under pressure.  Sounds like there’s definitely a leak, but getting those fittings to thread in normal and tighten at the end is key to ensuring it’s done right.

Rabin

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