Garbled Transmissions - Part Un

Pujo! finished the Reno LeMons event stuck in third gear. Actually, Pujo! proved to be quite capable as an automatique, setting our fastest lap time with just third gear. We decided that even though the single speed transmission was clearly a performance improvement, having multiple gears from which to choose would be good for loading on and off the trailer. Last weekend, the transmission was extracted from our brave patient.


Today, we decided to crack open the tranny and see what secrets lie underneath its aluminum skirt. With the transmission repair skills of 16th century blacksmiths, we set to work.



Being stuck in third gear, the gearbox proved reluctant to share its inner workings with us. Being Surrender Monkeys, we never give up umm valiantly continue are too cheap to take it somewhere to be fixed, so blindly continue forward. (Having a budget of pocket lint and unused postage stamps helps with our DIY work ethic).


We eventually prevailed in opening the transmission. But not without the dreaded sound of pieces falling apart inside. This is where we finished for the day. We've got fifth gear (or is it reverse?) out. The selector fork is still immobile. Today we want to find out why the shifter mechanism is stuck; hopefull it's something obvious.

Then there is the simple frighteningly complex task of putting this thing back together. There was no shouting and only minimal cursing during this session. Stay tuned for part deux.

Lifting old Pugs, 2 schools of thought.

The story so far...

When we left Reno, Pujo! had some issues. The major one was the (thankfully) jammed-in-third-gear transmission. We were able to finish the race with nothing but 3rd. Ironically setting our fastest lap times with the broken transmission. We actually debated whether or not to fix it, but soon came to the conclusion that even though we get by just fine with the one gear, it really sucks not having reverse. Not being able to let up the clutch pedal while the engine is idling also is kind of inconvenient.

This weekend we removed the knackered transmission from Pujo!. We'll be installing the spare transmission from the donor car (Pugly) later this week. Pujo! is showing some substantial oil leakage from multiple places. We might spend the money on a tube of RTV to try to keep some of the vital fluid inside the engine block. Fortunately the leaks aren't large, there's just a lot of them. We'd like to avoid having to fill the crank case at every pit stop if possible.


The Forklift. My tool of choice for moving dead French iron. Good for cracking walnuts and opening locked doors too.



Doug has the goods to please both sexes. Who doesn't appreciate a nice pair of lifts?



"How did we get an oil leak back here??" Wonders Alan. Sorry Alan, that's one of those inscrutable French trade secrets.



Dark matter? We have that. Who knew it was gunky and slippery too. Astrophysicists are wasting their time using telescopes to find the stuff.



The old transmission standing ready to begin its new life as a paper weight or a boat anchor.

Project Pujo!: Begins

Hi Pujo! fans! Your Spritemare is finally over and work on Pujo! begins! There's a bunch of broken stuff to fix, but we'll easily be ready for Arse-Freeze-Apalooza in November. We need to fix the transmission, which is still jammed in 3rd gear. Probably not a huge concern since we set our fastest lap times in Reno with just the one gear. Monkeys apparently drive better without the distraction of deciding what gear to be in. Our barely opposable digits are better suited for grasping bananas (and cheese) than cranky Peugeot gear shift levers anyway.

Let the two-steps-forward-three-steps-back posts begin!

Project Sprite: Completeted

The Sprite is done! It's tuned and running perfectly. Now all we need is some good weather to put some miles on it. The forecast looks like it'll be sunny and in the mid 70s by about Wednesday. We drove it between thunderstorms on Sunday, there was even a report of a funnel cloud about 10 miles south of where we were. Not optimal weather for breaking in an engine on an open car. Currently there are about two hours on the engine. There was just some minor blue smoke out of the tailpipe during our drive but once the rings wore in a little, that went away and the exhaust has been clear ever since. I'll post some pictures later, we forgot to bring the camera on our quick drives between downpours.

Forecast: Sunny and warm... unless you need to drive a car with no top.

We have almost everything done on the Sprite. Oil leaks are fixed and the engine has gone through initial break-in with the break-in oil. I used Joe Gibbs BR-30 Break-in oil. Very good stuff. Lots of zinc and other goodies in it. Don't use it for more than about 40 minutes though. The additives act like a fine polishing compound, we don't want it to start wearing our new engine out before we even drive it.

Once we change to fresh, clean oil and put the hood back on, we'll start driving. Except, it's now September in Western Washington and that means we can expect heavy rain every time we stick the key in the ignition. Like it's doing right now. And for the foreseeable future. Until June.

We'll keep watching the skies and keep our fingers crossed. :-)

Return of the Sprite

We're almost ready to get back to Pujo!. But first, one of the last few updates on the Sprite.

We found a great engine in Oregon. It's been rebuilt but never installed in a car even though it's about 10 years old. It was definitely assembled by someone who knew what they were doing. It's the proper shade of Austin agricultural green too. Over the last few weeks we've been rebuilding most things on the car. Every bolt and nut we could find was loose. It's been a far bigger project than we first anticipated. Last night we finished installing the engine and started it for the first time. Once we sorted out some strange electrical problems, the engine fired up and ran perfectly. Oil pressure is a little high, 70 psi at 1500 rpm. Fortunately we can adjust the regulator to fix that. The only oil leak seems to be from the oil pressure gauge fitting. The car is going to be fantastic when we're done.

Footloose and engine free!

Adding the transmission to the new engine.

Engine in place with almost everything attached.

It started on the second crank after we primed the oil pump and found the electrical problem. This is where I noticed a prodigious quantity of oil pouring from a bad fitting.

Tomorrow we'll fix the oil leaks and finish breaking in the engine.

Fun photos

No idea how we forgot to get this up on our blog. Jalopnik lists their all-time costumed favorites, and we made the list!? And here we were worried about being underthemed... something we're definitely improving upon if we make it to Thunderhill this year.

http://jalopnik.com/5317990/a-treasury-of-24-hours-of-lemons-team-costumes/gallery/

Sprite/Pujo! update

Been awhile since I last posted. It's not that I've forgotten, it's just that I don't want the blog to become like FaceBook.

Right now Sean is...
Clipping his fingernails.

Right now Sean is...
Enjoying the sound of an air conditioner.

Sean has sent you a quiz!
Do you like blue?

You have a friend request from someone you were happy to forget about from high school.

Bleah.

I'm just not cut out for FaceBook. I'd rather write nothing than let everyone know how much nothing is going on in my life at any given moment.

But I digress.

Now about the Sprite. No, it's not going to become a LeMons car. It's my dads car. My brothers and I gave it to him for his 80th birthday last November. And we've been trying to get it fixed ever since it's engine blew up a month ago. Sadly, rebuilding the engine is proving to be time and cost prohibitive. It's rebuildable, but just barely. It's really bad. Literally the worst engine I've ever seen that didn't have a rod sticking through the block. And yet it ran great until it... didn't. So, rather than spend a lot of the Summer trying to rebuild (my dad isn't getting any younger and the Northwest has limited good weather for driving an open car) we started looking for a good used or rebuilt replacement. It's taken a couple of weeks, but we found one. A rebuild, but never installed 948cc popped up in Oregon. The owner bought it with a couple of race engines and since it was rebuilt as a street engine he's never used it. I'm going down to pull the pan off it next Tuesday and if it looks good I'll bring it home and we'll drop it into the waiting engine bay. More on that as it developes.

For you Pujo! fans out there, no you haven't been forgotten (all 2 of you. Hi mom!). After the Sprite is done and I have a couple of weekend races out of the way in July and a vacation in early August, we'll be back working on Pujo!. There are some issues to fix. For one the gearbox is jammed in 3rd. Another is the electrical system. The alternator failed in Reno and we were running on battery for about half the race. Fortunately we brought a spare battery and kept charging and swapping. We have a blown shock. Not a really big deal, but rebuild kits are about $20 to do a pair, so we might as well fix it. Other than that and an oil change, Pujo! will be ready to race in November. The only really time consuming part of the whole project will be redecorating the car. It needs something more stylish. More bold. More artful.

More.... French.

Reno highlights

Step away from the Sprite for a weekend. Ahhhhh.
No, we're still not fortified enough to dive back into Pujo! for a while yet, wives are enjoying this small respite of actually seeing our husbands during daylight hours, except for Scott. He's been hiding in the basement for weeks assembling a "best of" video from our hours and hours of in-car footage. Recently, he finally emerged, blinking in the sunlight, and shared this with the rest of us.

Enjoy.

24 Hours of LeMons Reno-Fernley Scrapes and Spins

This features 2 quick minutes of the fun stuff our drivers got to see (and even participate in) behind the wheel.

Sprite interrupted

I think I found one of the contributing factors for our engine failure. The oil filter remote was sealed with a bunch of silicone against the block. Not that that's generally a bad thing, but you don't need to use half a tube. The main artery to the oil filter was nearly completely blocked with a sphincter of clear silicone. Some oil could still get through, but really not enough to effectively lubricate an engine running at freeway speed. The oil pan was filled with bronze shavings and an unidentifiable hunk of metal about an inch long. I also found what appears to be a worn out rod end bearing inside the oil filter can. I have no idea how something like that could have gotten in there. None of the oil channels are big enough to allow something like that through. The rod bearings for pistons 1 and 4 are completely shot. The rods clunk back and forth easily. Curiously, cylinders 2 and 3 are the ones with bad compression. I also noticed that the engine had been painted while assembled. There was conspicuous overspray on surfaces that aren't easily visible when the engine is in the car. It looks like whoever did the restoration ran out of enthusiasm after completing the body work and had decided to sell the car before he got around to the engine and transmission rebuild and just painted the engine to make it look pretty. There's also plenty of Stop-Leak in the water jacket.

Oooo, sparkly!

Not much oil can get through there.

More broken things. Color me surprised.

On your left, from the deepest, darkest corners of an oil filter can, the metal with mettle... A Semi Cylindrical Chunk of Bronze!

And on the right, brimming with random destructive potential, the oilpan annihilator... A Bent Hunk of Steel!

Shockingly clean for how bad most of the individual parts are.

Everything that I touch, starts to melt... like my clutch.

I started tearing down the engine today. I haven't gotten too far into it, just as far as removing the gearbox and looking at the clutch and pressure plate. If the rest of this engine has been put together with as much care and attention to detail as everything else has so far, it's going to be an adventure of epically bad proportions. The clutch was (barely) held on with 3 different length bolts. Most of them were finger tight. The teeth on the flywheel are about half way worn off and it looks like the flywheel was resurfaced with a die grinder equipped with a 36 grit pad. It's not even close to flat, you can see where it was only being touched in 2 places by the clutch. The clutch itself is the cheapest piece of crap I've ever seen. It looks like compressed cardboard. The bolts holding the bellhousing had no lock washers or even flat washers. Just bolt heads right up against the aluminum. I hope it wasn't a professional shop that did this work. Some doof in his garage I can forgive, sort of. But any shop that does work like this needs to not be in business.

This is what happens to a clutch...

...and a flywheel...

...when you let this guy work on your car.