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.

Battle of the Banned (F1 technology)

During a team meeting a few weeks ago we came to the conclusion that what this car really needs to give it the edge is some banned F1 technology. Active aerodynamics, that's what we need. I think the Faster Farms guys were clucking in the right direction with their bowling ball actuated ironing board wing. Brilliantly hillbilly that was. We're going with a more sophisticated approach. Brent (the artful) Picasso gave me a napkin sketch of his idea for a control unit.

Seemed too simple at first glance. My daughter disliked the flow of the drawing and betterized it.

This was starting to show promise. A few more tweaks and we had a working sketch.


I love it when a plan comes together! Now we just have to build it before Reno.

One Peugeot, over easy

Turns out that we were very lucky and the only damage to Pujo! was superficial. A few well-placed whacks with a big sledgehammer took care of the dents that were keeping the door closed and a few more got the trunk closing normally again.

That taken care of Doug and Sean replaced the broken out rear window, driver's door window and rear quarter window with lexan which not only is almost invisible but is indestructible and lighter to boot!

Next up on the to-do list was to figure out why the passenger-side rear tire was rubbing. Our best guess is that when the trunk was welded back on after the last accident (before we bought the car) that something wasn't perfectly straight. Sean solved the problem by cutting out some of the fender liner and the pounding out the fender lip with the big sledgehammer (which is getting to be our favorite tool these days). That made a mess of the paint on the already damaged right rear but a little touch up of Krylon Cherry Red made things as good as new (well if you are looking at the car from 50 feet away and have bad eyesight).

One funny thing that happened is that when Sean took the wheel off he smelled gasoline and saw that some fluid was leaking from the general area of the gas tank. Worried, we emptied the trunk (which was still full of our spares for the race) and discovered that a couple of quarts of diff fluid in the trunk had sprung a leak in the accident and had made a big gooey mess of things. But in a twist of fate the rollover had also liberated a big pile of fine dirt which had been trapped in the bottom of the driver's side rear fender and that made an excellent oil dry!

Next week we're planning to look at a few more small issues and then the plan is to take it to the March 15th autocross at Bremerton for a shakedown cruise!

Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty apes!

We started this venture as wee little Rhesus monkeys, not even worthy of shampoo testing. But through this adventure, blessed with moxy and opposable digits, we have matured into ApeRacers.

Praise the lowered!

Scott designed us some spring clamps to effectively cut a coil out of our suspension. The result is about 2" taken out of the ride height.


I'm going to have to do some more pounding on the rear fenders. The tires are rubbing again.


We were so happy with the results of the lowering that we went for a drive in the Canadian Arctic.


After the successful cold weather testing we stopped in a random parking lot in Bothell to take pictures, sign autographs and answer the questions of our adoring fans.

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.

Safety fast

Today we did a lot of safety oriented stuff. Hood pins. Window net. Battery disconnect switch. Oh, and of course adding the official Peugeot "the lion ain't no pussy!" decal. That's important information to anyone close enough to read our rear window.

Scott decided to try to do something about the massive oil leak around the oil pan. As you can see by the picture, Scott is not pleased with the amount of oil, grime and general filth he has to deal with. However he made use of the skills he learned while co-driving with me in my Triumph TR6 for a year. Having raced nothing but clean, reliable Japanese cars before he thought I was joking when I told him of the time honoured British tradition of the annual bolt tightening. Once or twice a year a Triumph owner/operator must climb underneath the car and tighten every bolt and nut or the car simply falls apart. This was the case with the Peugeot's oil pan. He discovered that the bolts holding it to the engine were all at least a quarter turn loose. It would have been... unfortunate if our oil pan fell off at Thunderhill. Not unexpected, but unfortunate.

-Sean

A scoop, sparks, and more sparks

This past weekend saw the monkeys gathered for some work on the Peujeot. Photo highlights appear below.

Alan took some scrap metal from Sean's machine shop's trash bin and bent up a nice scoop for the intercooler. This required the installation of a hole in the hood.
With the hole installed, Alan pop riveted the scoop to the hood. Firmly affixed and hermeticly sealed, the scoop passed inspection. Doug also generated sparks as cage construction continued.

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.

Snug as a Doug in a Pug

Nice seat mount Doug! I'm glad this falls under safety, it looks way too nice to be part of this piece of merde! :-)

Making Progress

Today Brett and I came over to Doug's place to test out the Peugeot's race seat location and to get some work done in preparation for installing the cage. Brett couldn't stay too long but Doug and I made lots of progress anyway. First step was to get the sunroof and it's mechanism out of the car as it just took up too much headroom. We'll put the sunroof panel itself back in place once the cage is in, probably by attaching it with several aluminum straps but for now it's a lot easier to have it out. The sunroof actually turned out to be pretty easy to remove, perhaps half an hour and 10 bolts and it was free!


Since the sunroof wasn't much of a problem I tackled removing the driver's window and mechanism so Doug can cut out the door for the cage. While I was doing that Doug removed both rear brake calipers and figured out what was holding them up and reinstalled them on the car. The bad news is Doug thinks we (or the previous owner) damaged the pistons in such a way that the e-brake won't work very well but we're not likely to need that for the race anyway.

In addition I removed lots of miscellaneous bits and wiring related to the parts we'd taken off and so it's starting to look more and more like a real race car. There still is a lot to do and less then 3 months to do it in so I suspect there will be a lot more work parties before we're done but we're making progress!