Braking news

Saturday Sean, Bret and I got the brakes back together and the car on the wheels. The only glitch was that our bigger caliper shims meant that our bolts were too short necessitating a run to the only open bolt shop 20 miles away in Tacoma. The car looks great on the ground with the new paint job and rotors but an unfortunate electrical glitch courtesy of our rebuilt alternator installation prevented us from testing our work. Hopefully the electrical problem is just a reversed wire and we'll have the car on the street later this week!

Monday update: The wires were reversed and the light's now out when the car is off and on when it's running even with the new alternator. Time to get out the service manual again!

Thursday update: The rebuilt alternator is no good so we've sourced one rebuilt by a Peugeot mechanic which should hopefully solve the charging problem. It also turns out that there wasn't enough clearance between the rotors and the calipers on one side so we toasted one. Since the race is in two weeks Sean just had the old Peugeot rotors turned (they had plenty of metal left) and we're going back to them for this race and we'll fiddle with the Porsche rotors again before the next race.

Braking without breaking the bank

As those of you who have followed us on the track know the Peugeot has awesome brakes (and from the factory no less). The cost of all the awesomeness is brake rotor wear however so we decided that rather than take a chance we'd put new rotors on for Infineon/Sears Point.

A quick check of the few remaining Peugeot parts suppliers in the USA revealed that 505 Turbo S brake rotors are a) as scarce as hen's teeth and b) cost as much as some fairly sizable jewels, about $350-$400 each. To top it off there are exactly two of them in the USA and if we want extras it's going to cost even more to have them shipped from France.

On to The Google. Hmm, early Porsche 944's had similar calipers/rotors to the 505. After much more research I found someone who had claimed to make the conversion with only light machining and a few extra holes to mount the 5-hole 944 rotor on the 8-hole 505 hub.

Off to NAPA to get a 944 rotor to measure. There are two choices, a $110 Chinese knock-off or the "value" rotors for $58 each. Being LeMons racers we chose the $58 ones of course and we opened the box to see "Made in Italy" and "Brembo" stamped on them! WTF, the Brembos are cheaper than the Chinese knock-offs???

Sean got to machining them and the results are beautiful, we needed caliper spacers about 4 times thicker than stock and 7 extra holes drilled but that was it! 505 owners have sweated for years the expense of Peugeot rotors and we just replaced $700-$800 of Peugeot parts with $116 worth of Brembos, cool!

Pujo! and the Technicolor dreamcoat.

After all the abuse that's been heaped on Pujo! over the last 2 years, we decided to be nice to him for a change and give him a new paint job. The best way to describe the last paint job I did is "Epic Fail". Those of you who have been reading for awhile and following our exploits know that in trying to replicate the Peugeot Rally Team stripe scheme, I may have accidentally painted the car like T.C.'s helicopter from Magnum P.I.

As you can see, a new paint scheme has been desperately needed for quite some time. Unfortunately, we've been spending more time sorting out mechanical problems than decorative problems and we never seemed to have the time to paint before a race. This time we have everything almost done and we could no longer ignore "Magnum".
See what I mean? You can't ignore Magnum. Especially with those shorts. Yow.


Initial sanding and masking comlpete.


Prime time! That means it's 9pm and I'm missing my shows!


If this were a '69 Camaro, I'd be done!


Paint that funky Peugeot white, boy.


Scott has the blues. He's trying to fix my catastrophic paint run. Good luck Scott. When I f*** up, I do it properly.


Red backside. Like a baboon, no?


There, much better. As long as you're over 25 feet away.

Ce qui, encore?

Je devine que nous devons de façon ou d'autre être d'une manière amusante aux organisateurs de CiTrons. Ils ont accepté notre demande encore! Quel est le problème avec ces camarades? Ne nous connaissent-ils pas enfoncent-ils un pieu français dangereux de merde et est-ce que quelqu'un pourrait être tué??

What, again?

I guess we must somehow be amusing to the LeMons organizers. They accepted our application again! What's wrong with these guys? Don't they know we're driving a dangerous French heap and someone could be killed??

Electron redistribution

Peugeot is a company with a long and storied history of racing. From rally to Le Mans to LeMons, Peugeots have been tearing things up. Pujo!'s 505 brethren were very successfully raced in SCCA showroom stock in the 80's. With this sort of pedigree, Pujo! is rightfully considered a racing thoroughbred. If this is the case, why did Peugeot place the 505's battery on the driver's side in the very front of the engine compartment? Clearly, we needed to rectify this design oversight.

A saucy little minx we know provided an informative guide to battery relocatification using the cable from an e30 chassis BMW 3 series car. The 6 cylinder versions of these cars come with a trunk mounted battery (it's even mounted on the passenger side!) and a long-ass battery cable that an impecunious monkey can score for the cheap price of $6.00.

Off to the self service junkyard!

Of the two e30 Bimmers in the junkyard, one was a 6 cylinder. It was quite a rat of a car. The fact that we were experiencing an unusually strong downpour helped by providing shivering cold to distract from the skankiness of this particular car. Pictured is the positive battery cable after I freed it from a pile of assorted wet garbage in the trunk. It snakes through a tight little hole behind the back seat and runs up along the floor on the passengers side of the car, secured with several hundred little plastic clips.


After stuffing the cable through the trunk and into the passenger compartment, the cable was fairly easily freed from its hiding place in the floor. In the picture you can see part of the cable coiled up in the passenger compartment, along with the speaker grill / kick panel that was liberated to allow the other end of the cable to come through firewall from the engine compartment. Notice the hammer perched on top of the toolbox? That's a BMW special tool for interior trim removal.

With the cable removed from the scheiße BMW, insertion into Pujo! commenced.

This involved relaxing contorting oneself into a shape that allows working amongst the racing seat mounts, roll cage, and pointy sharp crap on the floor of the car.


A bunch of pleasant discussion cursing allowed an installation solution to be found.



We had enough cable length to stretch from Pujo!'s original battery connection to the trunk, where the battery resides in cozy flammability next to the fuel tank. Note that Doug did build a really nice battery enclosure, it's just not pictured here (it's shy).

Another 15 minutes of fame?

And so, we left for Willows. We'll sum up each day of the race, but first, a quick side note.

As we got back to the hotel Friday night after a very fun team dinner at Casa Ramos (big thumbs up, by the way), a few of us began to get a photo message on our phones. Apparently, hitting mailboxes that day was the December issue of Grassroots Motorsports. A good friend of ours (hi, Laura!) took a picture of the cover. Who could that be? Why, that's Pujo! on the front cover, right by the banner, the representative photo for the article inside about LeMons racing. Our very own Reverend Scott, there in all his glory coming down "The Slide" at Reno-Fernley raceway.

On the Frickin' Cover of Grassroots Motorsports.



Representing $500 racing to everyone who lives under a rock and hadn't heard of it yet.

We're giddy. But if you've met us, that's really not a change from the normal, is it?

We have some catching up to do!

Yes, we just got back from Thunderhill.
Yes, the car finished the race.

But... we'd be doing a disservice if we told the story out of order. So we'll blast through the next couple of chapters and get all caught up.

After fixing the transmission (hooray for ingenuity and persistence!), the next few work parties addressed various issues with the car. The shocks were easily rebuilt with new seals and fresh oil (lighter weight, as the heavy weight we'd used before was probably the cause of shock failure). We relocated the battery to the trunk to make it easier to work on the engine, a little elbow room under the hood can make up valuable minutes at a LeMons race. Relocation made easy by a BMW 325 battery cable from our local junkyard. We decided we liked the spring performance with the clamps we'd used, so decided to clip the springs to make the change more permanent and prevent clamp failure. Basic maintenance of course, fluids, all that good stuff. During the course of this, we discovered that we'd need new axle nuts. Contacting our source for Peugeot parts, however, proved frustrating. The Turbo S model is, of course, different from your standard 505 in almost every way that matters, very little is interchangeable. Yes, he "could" get us the correct axle nuts, but like so many of the other parts we've asked him about, they would be about the "very last in the country" and Pug enthusiasts cry when they hear it would be going to a race car. This forced Sean to take the cheaper option. Owning your own aerospace machine shop makes it easy to replicate certain types of parts. A little 2" hex bar, some measurements, a couple hours, and only minimal swearing later, a brand new set of replacement nuts for less than we could have bought them.

We installed a more permanent location for our transponder, not that zip ties are a bad thing...


Time began to run short before the race. It was now less than a week to go, and our big ideas for redecorating would just have to be put aside. There's always another race, right? We had a team meeting to discuss trip logistics and strategies, and our youngest Monkey stepped in to ensure that our art theme would happen as planned, if not on the original scale.


We showed off the work we'd done to a tough audience, Doug's dad who was up from Nebraska, a wonderful man with many years of racing expertise under his belt. He was, to say the least, a bit dubious about our choice of a Peugeot.

The meeting was as good as a 6-person meeting can be with 2 people absent. Sadly, one of our drivers was feeling the effects of a cold, and another had been hit earlier in the week with swine flu. It was now Sunday night, and we were hopeful for quick recoveries from both guys. Our hopes turned to worry as Bret's fever continued, and by Tuesday, he was officially not going on the trip. At the last race, going from a 6-man team to a 5-man did not hurt us in anything other than the fun quotient. But even though we knew we'd have less daylight, this time was different. One of Doug's good friends from the Rally circuits was going to be coming up from San Diego to watch and support us in the pits. Would he be interested in taking a turn behind the wheel since he was going to be there anyway? After just a few questions which proved he wasn't completely mental, he agreed. We welcomed temporary Monkey Rick onto the team, and couldn't wait to meet him on Friday.

Garbled Transmissions Part Trois

Okay, that didn't work. We were able to select 1st through 4th and occasionally 5th, but reverse was out of the question. It would appear that some mechanic, the name of whom we cannot disclose, made an error in reassembling the transmission.

Back to the workbench!


We determined that the motion of the linkage that moves to reverse/5th was limited. Why?


Ah hah! The spring and plastic limiter that keeps you from selecting 6th and 7th gears was installed wrong! A quick bit hair-pulling session of puzzling what the correct order is for the spring, shim, washer, plastic chingus, other shim ensued.


The linkage resorted, we reassembled the transmission for the last time. We were sure to use plenty of assembly lube to make sure things went together well.


We properly torqued all the fasteners...


And tossed it back in the car. We've gotten really fast at this.


Where... IT WORKED! WE FIXED IT!!! And it cost absolutely nothing!

Garbled Transmissions Part Deux

Since we have no idea what we're doing care so much about doing the job right, especially when it involves the dark magic of transmissions is a complex job, we thoroughly washed all the pieces of the transmission.


We initially couldn't determine what was wrong. But, with the gearset out, we noticed the shift selector forks behaving poorly. Turns out that when Hercules made that last shift to third, he managed to send the shifter fork too far along its allowed travel and the little pin that tells the rest of the works, "Hey! I'm in third!" fell out. Here's a shot of the selector forks, the center one is tilted to show the hole that the little pin rides in.


And here's a shot of our troublesome little friend the pin.


With the little pin returned to its home, we put our transmission back together again.


We were very careful to make sure we got the shifting linkage reconnected. It would be a shame to have to take this thing apart again...


All sealed up, we threw the transmission back in the car in about 20 minutes.


Now to test it to confirm our repair worked!

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.