Battle damage

Here are some shots of Pujo! apres trailer tumble. This is a tough car; we all expected a wadded up ball of metal to be inside the trailer, most certainly not an angry French Bulldog, ready to drive!




After breaking free of the tie downs, Pujo! appears to have impacted his roof against something solid. Trailer wall against ground? Even though the roof is deformed, and the door is pinned shut, the rollcage is not touching any metal it shouldn't.




A quarter window didn't survive, and a valuable piece of exterior trim was damaged.




The ride height is a bit funky in the rear. We'll need to see what's going on here, I'd hate to have the suspension let go during the race. Welding rod is cheap, right?


While Pujo! did not make it to ThunderHill, he did drive home. Sean reported that the car was a bit on the chilly side as he drove through the snow back to the Monkey House. You can see the missing back window (no it's not just clean) and the dangling right side mirror. We'll need to resolve the mirror - those are handy. I think I saw a couple busted off mirror housings on the express lanes entrance...

The trip from Olympia-ish back to the shop was the longest distance the car has traveled in years and it didn't blow up or catch on fire. We're hopeful that the damage sustained bouncing around the trailer like a mixing ball in a can of Krylon hasn't messed things up too much.

Road Tripped

Had a little trouble on the way to Thunderhill this morning. Hit some black ice near Dupont on I-5 and spun off the freeway into a gully. We rolled at least once. The truck is almost certainly totaled. The trailer looks like a refugee from trailer park attacked by a tornado. The race car looks like it's been beaten with baseball bats and crowbars, but it survived. It ripped free of all of it's straps and landed on its wheels on the wall of the trailer. It wasn't fun, but I limped it home under its own power after the wreckers towed the remnants of the truck and trailer away.


Crap.


Somewhere underneath this wreckage is a rather startled little French car. Notice the checker board "wall" that used to be the "floor".


Nice lift kit, huh? I'll be all but invisible in Kent now!


Broken and battered, Aunt Bea held onto her dignity, refused all assistance and drove out of the ditch under her own power. No kidding, that is one seriously tough truck.


Ignoring the law, Bea hitched a ride anyway.


The trailer was a little spartan, so we spruced it up with this festive mobile made of fuel jugs!


Red paint smears from Pujo! are on every interior surface of the trailer except the floor. Pujo! must have felt like a drumstick in a bag of Shake-n-Bake. (credit to Bret Dodson for the comparison)


"Open other end"


Don't worry about being gentle, guys. WE'VE ONLY WORKED ON THAT CAR EVERY WEEKEND FOR THE LAST 6 MONTHS!!!


"For sale, 0ne pace convertible car hauler. Minor cosmetic work required. A real bargain!"


No humans were harmed in the making of this film.

Oops, a moment of clarity

We were so excited to have the car running for a change that we forgot one minor detail.


Hood pins. Those are important, aren't they?












Oh, well. Nothing a little contortion and brute force can't handle!














That'll polish out.

The joys of Peugeotnership

This question goes out to all of the Peugeot enthusiasts out there, you know who you are.

It's normal to find a river of brake fluid flowing from under a 505, yes?




Scott, in a valiant attempt to staunch the flow, intercepted the stream of fluid with his surprisingly absorbent beanie.


Fortunately it turns out that the Mystery Sphere is sub-reservoir that holds brake fluid under pressure to ensure the failure of this banjo fitting and was actually pretty easy to fix with a new O-ring.

Junk is the trunk

One of the reasons for Pujo! being acquired cheaply was the presence of past crash damage. We're not talking "Oh, it got banged into by a kid in a Civic" type of damage. This Peugeot looks to have been rammed at 60 miles per hour by a brakeless Peterbilt driven by a longhauler trucker coming down from a Benzedrine fueled cross country marathon. This damage has given Pujo! an articulated hind end.



Sean demonstrated this to me by grabbing the back bumper and lifting up and down. The crack in the picture would visibly open and close! Not good. One tap from an amorous Audi could tuck Pujo!'s tail like a scolded dog. Fortunately we have some good welding skills on our team.



The other side wasn't as obvious. But beneath the body filler lurked a similar crack.

Sploosh!

Untold years spent as yard art waiting for LeMons glory has a tendancy to rot the freaking hell out of degrade the brake and clutch systems of any car. During the hibernation, Pujo! developed a thirst for brake fluid. Unfortunately, no one could find where the fluid was going. Chief Hydraulic Monkey Scott attacked the problem with tearful resignation spunky optimism. While poking and prodding around the dashboard's nether regions, he dropped a nut and heard a hydraulic fluid-ey "Sploosh".



A torturously long brief bit of wrenching produced an oozing Rube Goldberg-inspired brake and clutch hydraulic system.



The fine folks at Peugeot have devised a way to tell any mechanic in the world to regardez the documentation before tearing into a mystery sphere.



Fortunately, we will be able to reuse the truffles fasteners that hold the brake and clutch systems to the rest of the car.

Saturday Doug, Scott and I (Alan) got together to work on the Peugeot again. It was another one of those "2 steps forward, one step back days" in many ways but when the day was done we (or at least some of us) had made significant progress.

I decided that I was going to try to make a hood scoop for the intercooler using a scrap piece of aluminum from Sean's shop (any metal without what the aerospace guys call a "cert" is effectively scrap so there is a good supply of metal sheet lying around the shop) despite never having used a sheet metal brake or the air-powered "nibbler" before. However I had once spent 3 months working in Sean's aerospace machine shop so I thought "how hard can it be?". Well that turned out to be like a monkey at a computer wondering how hard can it be to write like Shakespeare. I have to say however my design was an elegant one, simple yet functional and requiring only three bends with the brake. With help from Scott I got the pattern cut out and proceeded to do the first bend perfectly. Unfortunately I got cocky at that point and clamped down too hard on the aluminum. My next bend was going fine when all of a sudden I heard a crack and all the tension went away. Yup, I had bent the aluminum too much and snapped it like someone bending a paper clip too many times. Dejected I decided to try again. Once again the first bend went great and unfortunately I repeated the same mistake I made the first time, revealing that I am a) an idiot and b) should leave the bending to the professionals (Sean).

Thankfully Doug was having better luck at the other end of the car. We were worried about the wheel bearings so Doug pulled both axles and repacked the bearings. Thankfully the bearings appeared to be in good shape despite apparently being the ones that had originally came on the car from France! Not too surprising given how big each ball-bearing was, it looked like a string of pearls in a circular bearing race.

Scott decided to tackle removing the rest of the A/C and ID'ing and fixing the numerous vacuum leaks we knew the car had. Once he had wrestled all of the A/C hoses out of the way and removed them we discovered that two of the vacuum hoses down in the bowels had broken off. Thankfully without the A/C in place both hoses were now too long so Scott simply cut them off and re-clamped them. Scott also removed the cruise control but not its associated vacuum source because he was not sure if it served another purpose or not. We will have to figure out this week whether we can steal the CC's vacuum source for the blowoff valve but as our '85 manual doesn't cover the '88's vacuum hose routing we'll have to depend on the wisdom of the Peugeot list. I am a bit worried that we may have more problems in this area so I think we'll make sure to bring plenty of hose to the race just in case.

So all in all another successful weekend. I'll have to get Sean's help this week with making a new scoop (out of steel this time) so we'll be all prepared to cut through the hood next weekend.