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Been a busy couple of weeks, but here are a couple of small updates! Firstly, I wanted to finish talking about my time with the white BX last month. After tackling the interior and the accumulator sphere, I decided to have a go at the paint and see what could be done with it. While luckily most of the time it isn't particularly noticeable, there's still a lot of green muck thickly ingrained into the paint. After cleaning it for the first time, I took some paint renovator to it and got out most of the grime:  But as is obvious from that picture, that only got most of it out, and there was still quite a lot of ugly green crap in there. So I had another, more serious go at it. My dad doesn't have a machine polisher, and the Meguiar's stuff I brought seemed way too light for the work. Luckily he had some Autoglym Paint Renovator, which seems to be a product designed for exactly this scenario - trying to hand restore some seriously bad paint. After the Meguiar's, it seemed as crude as using a sledgehammer after a scalpel - I would apply some and begin to rub, and huge chunks of greasy green-black crud would begin to accumulate under the cloth and patter down the paintwork. It was really hard work, especially in the heat, but the results were pretty promising:  (To the left of the rear window sprayer is before, to the right is after)  While I was doing this, I began to realise that the paint wasn't in fact the flat white I had thought it was supposed to be. Some shine and reflection was beginning to come through:  (Perhaps it isn't clear, but I've polished a horizontal stripe through the middle of this panel, which is the only part that is reflective) Maybe this makes me an idiot, but I genuinely thought from looking at promotional materials etc. that the car was supposed to be that flat colour. Inquiries to the Citroen Club UK have since confirmed that no, it's supposed to be shiny  So when I go back, I'll be making more passes of the paint until I can get it perfect. For now, though, it's pretty presentable and no longer has green-brown streaks, though I haven't done the wheel trims yet. Here's a picture of it post-scrubbing, with my dad's Porsches: ------ I also managed to find a set of BX GTi alloys for my GTi. BX-specific wheels and wheel trims are vanishingly rare, the guy I bought the GTi from had an extremely ratty set of these that he showed me and held like they were his newborn babies, so I'm extremely happy I managed to find them, especially for the very reasonable price of 110EUR for the set. Maybe one day I'll find the missing wheel trim for the white BX, but I've only seen one come up in the last 6 months of looking and it was gone pretty much instantly.  They're not in the best shape of their life, but they're not awful either and will do just fine until I can get them refurbished. They come with tyres that aren't dryrotted and have plenty of tread but are extremely old - they will do to get the car inspected, or to move it around but will be replaced ASAP. I'm thinking of refurbing them in the 16v style, with a gunmetal face and silver edges. The result would be something like this:  BalloonFish posted:Since my username and avatar comes from one of Citroen's 1960s advertising campaigns, I don't really have to say how much I'm enjoying this thread, especially since someone's actively saving BXs. The Lancia and the Mk3 Polo (a car I have a strange soft spot for) are added bonuses! You and your friend have excellent taste in weird old cars! Every car pictured is one I've looked into buying at one point or another! How long have you had the 2CV, and is it a hard thing to keep in good shape? Also, there should be some Lancia and Polo updates coming up soon, as well as something on the Mercedes 
Grakkus fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Sep 27, 2018 |
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Sep 27, 2018 18:40
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No word of a lie think of me when you eventually want to sell either of those, the white one particularly.
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Sep 27, 2018 19:03
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Grakkus posted:You and your friend have excellent taste in weird old cars! Every car pictured is one I've looked into buying at one point or another! How long have you had the 2CV, and is it a hard thing to keep in good shape? Also, there should be some Lancia and Polo updates coming up soon, as well as something on the Mercedes I've had the 2CV eight years now, and it was my only car for four of them. The day to day upkeep and servicing is very simple (not surprising since it was designed for French peasant farmers who had never owned anything more complicated than a horse cart before) but there's a lot of Citroen weirdness so you have to re-learn a lot of stuff (the ignition system, for instance, or the suspension) but once you get your head round it it's very easy. Like a lot of Citroen engineering! It does need quite a lot of maintenance though- steering needs greasing every 1000 miles, engine oil and filter every 3000, slap some grease on the suspension every six months, squirt some vegetable oil into the suspension cans every year. Beyond the regular service work things can get tricky. Access to the non-service parts can be a real bitch because of the way everything's packed under the bonnet. The front wings are held on with four nuts and (theoretically) come off in less than a minute. They did on the original 1948 design, but by 1988 they'd added a load of extra stuff like the wing-mounted indicators and little bolt-on side panels so you also have to disconnect a bunch of wiring and fiddle with little M6 bolts in awkward places. And even with the wings off you find the heater system (not part of the original design), the alternator (ditto, and nearly as big as the rest of the engine) or some aspect of it being right-hand drive gets in the way of what you need to get to - you end up doing most jobs with about two feet of socket extension bars and flexi-joints. That aside it's been the most reliable classic car I've owned, it's huge fun to drive and all the parts cost relative pocket change and can be ordered online. The biggest problem is the rust - 2CVs love to corrode. I've already done a bunch of welding to the body and there's rust starting to come through in new places. Although mine passed its last MoT I've since found that the chassis has pretty much had it - jack it up and you can see the bonnet/A-post joint open up as the front end stays on the floor and the chassis bends! So the plan in the new year is to rebuild it on a galvanised chassis and cut all the rust out of the body while it's off. I was planning to do a thread on it!
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Oct 1, 2018 08:25
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I'm so happy that we have a thread on old Citroëns. The DS is increasingly climbing my bucket list (need my old Alfas first, unless something cheap turns up). The Traction Avant is one of my dads favorite car ever but he's not interested in actually owning one. He loves the DS as well. I wonder if anyone has done an EV conversion of a DS.
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Oct 1, 2018 08:33
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There's a guy somewhere around here who, around 15 years ago, said "gently caress it!" and tore apart his 2CV, had every single chassis and panel part galvanized, and put it back together again as is.
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Oct 1, 2018 09:11
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MrOnBicycle posted:I'm so happy that we have a thread on old Citroëns. The DS is increasingly climbing my bucket list (need my old Alfas first, unless something cheap turns up). The Traction Avant is one of my dads favorite car ever but he's not interested in actually owning one. He loves the DS as well. Traction Avants are amazing. In a way more startling than a DS because they look like a 1930s car but drive like a 1990 Peugeot 605. You expect the DS to be both brilliant and weird just by the look of them but the Traction not only feels more normal but yet very, very modern but was in many ways even further ahead of the state of the art than the DS was. The Traction came out at a time when everything was flatheads, body-on-frame, beam axles and leaf springs. I don't think the industry as a whole (by which I mean you could buy an 'average' car which drove the same way) for 40 years. And there is at least one EV-DS: http://amanoauto.blogspot.com/ bolind posted:There's a guy somewhere around here who, around 15 years ago, said "gently caress it!" and tore apart his 2CV, had every single chassis and panel part galvanized, and put it back together again as is. That's the way to do it. The 2CV was originally supposed to be built out of aluminium alloy, but post-war it was far too expensive. IIRC they considered galvanising the steel ones but it would have cost too much (and it's in no company's interests to make a literally immortal car). I'll stop cluttering up Grakkus' Citroen Kitchen now. Save it for my own thread when I start pulling apart my own cars!
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Oct 1, 2018 21:06
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bolind posted:There's a guy somewhere around here who, around 15 years ago, said "gently caress it!" and tore apart his 2CV, had every single chassis and panel part galvanized, and put it back together again as is. Theres a bloke here in the UK who'll sell you a brand new galvanised chassis for about £500. My dad bought one a couple of years back to build a Lomax 223
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Oct 1, 2018 22:45
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BalloonFish posted:Traction Avants are amazing. In a way more startling than a DS because they look like a 1930s car but drive like a 1990 Peugeot 605. You expect the DS to be both brilliant and weird just by the look of them but the Traction not only feels more normal but yet very, very modern but was in many ways even further ahead of the state of the art than the DS was. The Traction came out at a time when everything was flatheads, body-on-frame, beam axles and leaf springs. I don't think the industry as a whole (by which I mean you could buy an 'average' car which drove the same way) for 40 years. Interesting! I know they were ahead of their time and I've read/heard lots of people saying that they are "modern" in their driveability, but not that modern. Might be able to convince my Dad that it might not be such a horrible idea after all..... Very cool EV, really fits the DS image.
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Oct 2, 2018 11:31
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Some parts have arrived!! Timing belt+water pump kits for both BXes, a valve cover gasket for the white BX and a head gasket for the GTi! I'm very excited - the GTi stuff is going on as soon as I get back to Denmark in a couple of days and with any luck, it will be driveable in the near future The white BX will have to wait a while longer for its turn.Meanwhile, Fulvia things are happening:  More on this when I've run out of time to work on cars and can get back to posting about them. BalloonFish posted:I've had the 2CV eight years now, and it was my only car for four of them. I have to say, having a 2CV as your only car for four years is pretty awesome and I applaud your eccentricity  As for rust, I feel your pain; after owning two w124-generation mercedes with plastic cladding that perfectly hides appalling messes underneath, plus a 50 year old italian car, it brings me immense relief to own fully galvanised BXes that can sit in a mouldy alley for a decade and come away with only minor issues.BalloonFish posted:Traction Avants are amazing. In a way more startling than a DS because they look like a 1930s car but drive like a 1990 Peugeot 605. You expect the DS to be both brilliant and weird just by the look of them but the Traction not only feels more normal but yet very, very modern but was in many ways even further ahead of the state of the art than the DS was. The Traction came out at a time when everything was flatheads, body-on-frame, beam axles and leaf springs. I don't think the industry as a whole (by which I mean you could buy an 'average' car which drove the same way) for 40 years. I've never had the opportunity to drive a Traction Avant but I always thought they were fantastic both in design and engineering, this information only solidifies its place on the bucket list. Along with an SM (hnnghh). Also, I insist you keep cluttering up my kitchen, at least until you start your own thread bolind posted:There's a guy somewhere around here who, around 15 years ago, said "gently caress it!" and tore apart his 2CV, had every single chassis and panel part galvanized, and put it back together again as is. Christ, I can only imagine what that would cost in Denmark..
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Oct 3, 2018 13:47
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Grakkus posted:Some parts have arrived!! Getting new parts in the post is one the best things - all shiny bits, full of optimism! Fitting them can often be rather different but it gets me every time. quote:I have to say, having a 2CV as your only car for four years is pretty awesome and I applaud your eccentricity What can I say, I'm a sucker for punishment! I had various ancient Land Rovers as my one-and-only cars for five years, so even a basic 2CV was something of an upgrade! Then I had an Austin Metro for two years, which you could virtually see fizzing away in front of your eyes in wet weather, then I ran my 59-year old 848cc Mini as my daily for a year and a bit...unsurprisingly that also now needs a whole heap of welding to it! By contrast the Xantia is the newest car I've ever owned and it was a joy to realise that they basically don't rust other than a well-known spot at the back of the rear door pillar/rear end of the sill. When you have three cars and only space to put one under cover it's nice to have one which can live outside. We have very similar car tastes, it seems! My Dad had a W124 300TE which was a brilliant car - he put 260,000 miles on it and it only ever really needed servicing and consumable bits like dampers, bushes, hoses etc. Guess why he got rid of it? The entire rear end started rusting! He's just finished restoring a 1977 Alfasud, which when he bought it was more air than steel. quote:I've never had the opportunity to drive a Traction Avant but I always thought they were fantastic both in design and engineering, this information only solidifies its place on the bucket list. Along with an SM (hnnghh). An SM (double-hnngh) is the only hydropneumatic Citroen I haven't managed to have a drive of, but I want one so much...
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Oct 3, 2018 14:50
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I have an opportunity to have a set of louvres made for my GTi. Yay or nay?
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Oct 4, 2018 12:11
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Holy poo poo why did you even waste time posting that's incredible. Do it do it do it!
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Oct 4, 2018 12:34
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voting yes as many times as i am allowed to
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Oct 4, 2018 13:04
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Grakkus posted:I have an opportunity to have a set of louvres made for my GTi. Yay or nay?  Voting yes!
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Oct 4, 2018 13:07
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Another YES vote - almost any 1980s car can be improved by adding louvres, and the rest of the BX's styling all-but demands it. DO IT!
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Oct 4, 2018 13:48
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Absolutely. Louvres all the way.
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Oct 4, 2018 14:00
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Seeing as I'm looking into getting some for my 80s car, it's a yes from me.
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Oct 4, 2018 15:04
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So I'm hearing a no on the louvres? The trick now is to find a scrap hatch for the guy to build it on - that still has its spoiler! Most have been scavenged to put on other BXs
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Oct 5, 2018 10:28
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I've been browsing BX adverts because of you and the cars are firmly in 2 camps at this point - "I know what I got future classic £3k+" and "tatty, some issues, £300+". Looks like they'll never get cheaper than they are now so picking up a whole parts car is probably the best way to go.
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Oct 5, 2018 12:07
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The problem with parts cars is that I get the irresistable urge to bring them back to life.. Or is that your secret plan? It probably is a good idea though, will have to take a look!
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Oct 5, 2018 13:45
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Secret plan uncovered if you find a dedicated breaker with a suitable hatch I'm sure they could easily ask £200+ so if you've space and time (always a problem with projects) a parts car is a good idea. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a cream one with a brown interior, mine was a 16TRS and fully equipped.
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Oct 5, 2018 13:53
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Olympic Mathlete posted:Seeing as I'm looking into getting some for my 80s car, it's a yes from me. I also want a set of louvres for my 80's car. If you can - buy those louvres now!!
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Oct 5, 2018 19:11
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I'm still upset that the last set of new metal louvers for my generation Celica got bought a decade ago and now the only available ones are extremely lovely looking ABS plastic. Absolutely get those louvers.
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Oct 6, 2018 16:20
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Good news! More rare BX parts have been secured! I joined an obscure Polish BX club on Facebook with about 20 active members and started asking around if people had parts going spare - and to my astonishment the doors to a seemingly endless vault of good poo poo have opened, and at incredibly good prices! A brand new GTi rear spoiler, £120 new, £50 used - £10. A set of front foglights for the GTi, £god knows new, £70 used - £15. And the piece de resistance: not one, but three of the missing wheel trims for the white BX. I've been looking for one since I first bought the car back in April, the design I need is basically impossible to find outside of the new old stock ones that cost way too much for what they are. The little valve stem cover thing is even harder to find; second hand wheel trims that pop up for sale never have them, and Citroen hoarders just laugh when I ask if they have any for sale. Which is why when a guy said he had one he would sell me for £4, I was expecting a busted up piece of crap. I was wrong:  He then found another while digging around for the spoiler and I told him to throw it in as well, then his friend popped up and said he had one more. Starting my own little hoard now and it feels gooood I'll probably put the tattiest one on the car, as it needs to be repainted white anyway, and save the two others. I'd also like to find someone who can 3d scan the fabled valve stem cover and print me a bunch to put on my other wheels/keep as backups.The spoiler has been sent off to the louvre guy along with a cheap rear hatch, so he can start work I also recently did a bit of work on the Mercedes, reversing a huge fuckup on my part from a few months prior. I had decided to buy new, shiny wheel bolts and in an epic moment of stupidity bought ones that were too long. This wouldnt have been a huge problem, except that on W124s, the handbrake mechanism sits inside the rear wheel hubs! So I throw the bolts on, drive it 5 feet with a horrible graunching noise emanating to the back, crap myself and change them back. I had hosed something up, though - there was a loud tinkling of broken metal from the rear hubs when the car was moving after that, loud enough to come through into the normally tomblike interior. So I took the wheel, caliper and rotor off:  Hello, you're not supposed to be there:   Turns out, one of the retaining springs was slightly messed up:  Old vs new:  Back in the car, after a surprisingly minimal amount of swearing and fiddling despite the tiny cramped wheel hub and the strength of that spring:  Time to throw on some shiny new rotors and pads:  Wait, what?  poo poo. Fuckers at the parts store sold me the wrong size rotors. Had to throw the old ones back on, and then left before the correct ones arrived. It'll have to wait until next time!
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Oct 18, 2018 19:34
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Just a quick update. Agreed on a price with the louvre guy, sent him my spoiler, he's just waiting for the rear hatch I ordered to arrive and he can begin work. I ordered a hatch 10 days ago, and only found out yesterday that it hasn't been sent yet because the vendor has some kind of shipping issues that he "forgot" to inform me about. I've also been shopping around for someone to do the bodywork and paint on the Lancia. Most places have a 3-6 month wait time, which will hopefully give me time to sort most of the mechanical stuff. It looks like I have three options: A) A premium restoration specialist located about 30 minutes away from me. He's come to inspect the car in person, seems to be a legit thorough guy, but has given me the biggest reasonable quote for the work (I say reasonable because one company quoted me double what this guy did, off the cuff, without seeing the car). B) Another high end place about 2.5 hours away, who have given me a quote about 25% lower than A, probably because they're out in the countryside where costs are lower. They also look like they do excellent work, but haven't seen the car in person yet, basing their quote purely off pictures I sent. C) Another local place, about 50 minutes away, that is starting up and hasn't built a rep yet. Despite that, they come recommended to me by local Youngtimer club members who say they do excellent work. They quoted me a price about 50% of A. I'm quite torn on which option to pick. I'm tempted to roll the dice on B, they haven't seen the car yet but it seems unlikely their final quote would exceed A's and I could potentially save enough money to pay for the interior refurb. Or I could really save some money and go with C, but risk them doing a worse job, though I have no evidence that that would be the case... My dad popped round to where the white BX sits and gave it a little run to keep things in order:  He says it runs great, though it is making a bit of a mess on the ground:  Slightly missed the leak with the wood, whoops. Gotta get back and fix that! Final news, the mechanic reports that the GTi head has been refurbished and skimmed, and is back on the car! Hopefully in a few days, I'll be able to go pick it up! Tremendously excited!
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Nov 1, 2018 19:40
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I'd honestly be tempted to go with C personally, but I'm a horrific cheapskate.
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Nov 1, 2018 20:07
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Yeah, I'm tempted by C myself, since they have a good rep in the local community. I'm just leery of having the same thing happen as happened to the front wings of my Mercedes, where I had them painted at a good price but the paint is already bubbling, after a year of mostly sitting in a garage - that said, I knew going in that that place was going to be a huge gamble but couldn't help giving it a shot at a price of £60 per panel  C is nowhere near that level of bargain basement.The guy in A gave me a spiel about 'only using the best quality paints'. Is that a thing or just marketing crap? I was under the impression that it's the effort of the painter that makes a paintjob good, not what paint he uses. I'm hardly an expert though.
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Nov 2, 2018 15:16
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I'm sure there's a difference between good and bad paint but I can't imagine anyone who wants a good reputation long-term would cheap out there, not after spending the hours in prep needed to get a good finish.
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Nov 2, 2018 16:17
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Paint does matter to a degree but it's more about the other supporting tech (booth, gun, etc) and the painter. I would talk to the guys at C extensively and try to get a better read. If you think they seem good, go with them.
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Nov 4, 2018 18:02
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B is too far away to consider IMO. C is worth checking out. Places with a rep charge more just because they can. Places without a rep are usually started by good guys from place A&B sick of getting paid poo poo while the owners get the cash after making a rep. C might be their former employee that did all the hard work and now wants some pay. Solid check up with them and ask for previous customers work . Not sure if you need that as you seem to have plenty of feedback already? But maybe you can email/call and talk to people that know about 'C' see if they are OK about a visit and look at their cars if you have any doubts? E: Paint quality matters, it usually keeps it stuck on there. But talking to people who have been to "C" a year+ ago should sort out whether they use paint that peels off or not. Fo3 fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Nov 4, 2018 |
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Nov 4, 2018 19:27
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A manual, V6 XM wagon has come up for sale for stupidly low money. I've been looking for one for ages, but of course it pops up when I simply don't have the space for one, nor the time to deal with securing it (it's about 1200km away). I'll never see one as clean, for as little money again 
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Nov 6, 2018 14:34
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FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFuck. The mechanic working on the GTi finished buttoning up the engine, took it for a shakedown drive, calls me and says its the same as it was pre-HG replacement. The head was pressure-tested and was okay (supposedly, I have no actual proof of this). At this point there's a 5% chance its the oil/water cooler in which case I wasted a load of money, or the cylinder liner o-rings are shot, in which case I wasted a load of money and have to spend a shitload more.
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Nov 6, 2018 19:46
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Update on the GTi. I met with the mechanic yesterday, and sure enough it looks like the cylinder liner o-rings have been unseated and are letting coolant through. The fix for this is to take the head back off again, then drop the oil pan and pull the pistons and liners from below, reseal everything and put it back together. The good news is that he's pretty unhappy about the whole situation himself, and is therefore only going to charge me for his expenses - testing and skimming the head, fluids etc. So the only thing I've really lost is time. My main option at this point is to have it shipped back to a Citroen specialist I know and have him fix it, which will cost roughly double what this mechanic is charging me, but I will have the security of knowing it was done by someone that really knows their stuff (the guy owns a brace of 1920s Citroen Torpedo Sports and has cars shipped to him from around Europe for fixing. He considers my 30 year old BXes modern!). This will be a bit of a hassle though, as then I would need to bring it back to Denmark to go through the 2 week export process, then take it home again. The other option that I have proposed to the current mechanic is that I pay him what we originally agreed on for the HG, and in return we do the o-ring fix in his workshop, with me doing the lion's share of the grunt work removing the head and then him assisting on the liners themselves. He's going to discuss it with the owner of the space and get back to me. The old HG:   Being back with the car again after over 6 weeks of not seeing it has reminded me of how shockingly mint it is (aside from the obvious). Inside the car there is zero trim rattle, zero slop in the gear stick(!), and no wear on the gear knob, pedals or steering wheel, it literally looks like it just came out of the factory. All the factory stickers are in the doorjambs and in the engine bay, all the wiring is still in the factory sleeves and untampered with, and the only body damage is a small patch of surface rust on the B pillar and a peanut-sized chip in the hatch spoiler. When it's up and running, this car is going to be really nice. In other news, I ordered a full set of IFHS comfort spheres for the white BX and my dad's CX. They're aftermarket spheres that have the same volume and pressure as OEM ones but have a larger diameter restrictor hole in the connector. The effect of this, as the name suggests, is a softer ride, without affecting any other suspension parameters. They should be the final piece of the puzzle to get the white BX on the road, as currently at least two of the spheres have totally collapsed and the ride is rock hard. Can't wait to throw them on and try them out!
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Nov 13, 2018 13:39
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So, November hasn't been a particularly great month. After the mechanic hosed the GTi up, I arranged for someone to ship the car back to my workshop and booked some time off and a plane ticket, planning to just fix it myself rather than rely on others - I figured I couldn't make it any worse than it already is, and the job is time consuming rather than especially complicated. I accepted a bid on my shipping order with the idea that I would load the car the day before my flight, then meet it at the other end. When the day comes around, I gave the guy a call and he tells me he is already on his way out of the country, and that he can take it next week if I want  I put up a new last-minute order, but predictably the only bid I got was for an astronomical amount. So, the GTi wasn't going anywhere. I figured I might as well make the most of my time in my workshop so I order a bunch of parts that the Mercedes needs, express delivery. Did they make it on time?Like gently caress did they make it on time. They arrived the day before I was due to leave. Along with the gasket kit and head bolts for the GTi, so I wouldn't have been able to finish that job anyway.  I must admit, the sight of a giant pile of parts did cheer me up though To add insult to injury, the rear hatch I had ordered shipped by 48 hour express to the guy that makes custom louvres at the beginning of the month had vanished without a trace. Parcel tracking traced it to a central sorting warehouse (that it took 6 days to get to), where it promptly sat for nearly 3 weeks before a couple of irate phone calls led to it being found and delivered. The result of this is that I missed my spot in the queue for the louvres and have to wait until probably January for them, if not longer. I did however get a couple of small but satisfying things done. 1st gen TTs have a couple of very common issues with their instrument cluster; pixels die in the central displays and the temperature and fuel gauges go out of alignment. In my particular case the temperature gauge was fine but I had the other two problems, the fuel gauge one being especially severe with it being nearly 50% out of whack - more of an annoyance than a problem for me, but has nearly caused some problems in the past when I let other people use the car.  Luckily, there 's a TT club member who helps people with fixing their instrument clusters, who happens to work just down the road from me. He advised me that there was a way to remove the pod without much dash disassembly; it was just a matter of four screws and popping some trim off clips. Fiddly as hell because the screws are deep inside the dash, there's not much space in there and if you drop them they disappear forever into the innards of the dash, but after a bit of sweating and bomb-squad-level focus I managed to get it out:   Drove the pod over to the guy, who in exchange for a case of beer helped me out with desoldering the old display and soldering the new one in, as well as replacing the shot motor on the fuel gauge. No pics of this part, sadly, but a few hours later I had a fully functioning instrument cluster!  Note the fuel level in the before and after shots, the car hadn't driven at all between them - that's how off the gauge was. I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out, having a functional display makes the car so much more pleasant to drive. I also finally got to see the wheel trims I had bought for the white BX first hand. One new old stock and one incredibly worn out one:  I figured that since it needs to be painted white anyway to match the car, I would refurbish the crappy one a bit and keep the perfect one as a backup. It was in spectacularly poor shape, gouges and curb rash everywhere and a small chewed up section along the edge:  I washed it:  Sanded it with 800 and then 2000 grit sandpaper and primered it:  At which point I realised that my sanding was woefully inadequate and pretty much all the rough areas before I had started were still visible, as can be seen in the above picture. So I sanded it again, more vigorously, hit it with some spray filler, sanded it and then primered again:    At this stage, it was pretty good outside of a small chip on the face that the filler hadn't fully filled, and a bit of scarring on the edge. Definitely much, much better than my first attempt. So, I continued on to paint. The first two coats went on great, and then on the third, disaster struck:  While trying to paint the insides of the bolt holes I screwed up and got some extra paint next to one of them. Stupidly, I thought I could wipe the fresh layer of paint off and try again, but as many of you probably already know, spraying fresh paint 'melts' the layers underneath as well, so i was left with this tacky swipe. It was around midnight on the last day, so there was no way I was going to have time to sand and fix it. I ended up just putting two more thick layers on which helped a good deal, it's still ugly up close but from 5-6 feet away it looks pretty good:  On the car, nobody will notice unless they bend down to inspect it up close. In my irritation I was a bit sloppy on the last few layers as well, but I'm planning to refinish the other 3 anyway, so while I'm doing that I'll just perfect this one too. Preferably not in the middle of the night. As for the GTi, I'm looking for someone to keep it with in Denmark for the time being as it is unregistered and therefore illegal to park on public roads. A friend of a friend has a workshop and I there's a small chance I'll be able to take it there and work on it, as I brought all the necessary parts with me; this would be ideal as it would save me a lot of money in transport fees. Failing that, I'll just have it transported back to my workshop in mid-December and then hopefully drive it back when I return to my girlfriend in January. Assuming the transporter shows up.... Grakkus fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Dec 3, 2018 |
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Dec 3, 2018 21:16
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Fascinating to read about these struggles even though they are affecting you; time has not been on your side... Impressive amount of work even though things aren't quite working in your favor. That wheel looks great! Much better than before but not 'perfect'. Meh, seems perfectly fine to me!
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Dec 3, 2018 22:13
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jink posted:That wheel looks great! Much better than before but not 'perfect'. Meh, seems perfectly fine to me! Thanks! It's my first time trying to paint a wheel so it'll definitely do Exciting things happening so far in December! I was at my dad's briefly last weekend and had a fiddle with the white BX, it's soooo close to being road ready but I hit a couple of unforseen snags that mean that it'll have to wait until next time I'm there to be fully ready. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The car had two issues I have mentioned before - a pretty massive hydraulic leak and shot suspension spheres. The two front spheres were okayish, the butt test rated them at about 60-70% of optimal performance, but the rear ones had totally collapsed - when this happens, fluid penetrates the inner membrane and fills the entire sphere, the result being that the attached strut becomes rock solid as the damping is being provided by uncompressible hydraulic oil rather than nitrogen gas. Makes for a very uncomfortable ride, not to mention a bit dangerous! So, using the inner tube + hose clamp method I detailed earlier in the thread, I got the front spheres replaced with little effort:    It's worth noting that when you replace these suspension spheres, you have to crack the seals on them while the system is pressurised, as otherwise certain elements of the strut can twist and crack from the stress being applied to the sphere. The pressure inside the system is sufficiently high that turning a sphere a quarter turn out of the 20-odd it takes to remove it will cause LHM to come flooding out through the threads. I really wouldn't want to see what would happen if you continued loosening one under pressure. I then moved to the rears, which were..... not in great shape. I'm pretty sure they have never been changed in the lifetime of the car.  I tried for a good 4-5 hours, but no amount of WD40, swearing and hammering on the hose clamp would get the things to move. As luck would have it though, someone was selling an old Citroen sphere removal tool on ebay for only £15, so I picked that up. Hopefully that will do the trick next time I'm there. Now to the other problem, the leak. There's a steady drip of LHM coming from the centre-right hand side of the subframe. Exactly where the octopus lives. As a quick reminder, the Citroen octopus pipe is a conglomeration of low-pressure hydraulic return hoses, it gathers nearly all of the return lines on the car and then sends them up to the reservoir. It's fairly delicate and loves to leak. On the BX, the middle part looks like this:  Jesus christ. Every pipe coming off that thing snakes around different components of the car and they run in every direction and some are many feet long. There is no room to work on it as it is jammed between the subframe, firewall and engine, where frequent heat cycling makes it brittle and liable to crack. Replacements have been out of production for decades and are thusly rare and expensive. There is one saving grace to this extraordinarily shittily designed pipe though: It's completely redundant. It's entire purpose is to send LHM under low pressure back to the reservoir. If it starts leaking, the easiest thing to do is to simply bypass it - cut the pipe off, plug the hole in the octopus, then just reroute the pipe into a T-join further up the line to the reservoir. It can (and frequently is) bodged together by all manner of hardlines, fuel hoses, irrigation pipe joiners, or whatever else can be scavenged, and often those bodge fixes last for the rest of the life of the car. The only consideration is that LHM melts regular rubber, so fuel hose needs to be used as replacement pipe. The first part of the job was to confirm that the octopus was the damaged component, rather than a cracked pipe or something else entirely. When getting under the car, I noticed a big fuckup that was probably the cause of this leak in the first place - someone had ziptied all the octopus offshoot pipes tightly to various other components in the area, thus putting them under additional stress. The intention was probably to make it all more tidy, but what a bad idea with an already fragile system. I cut away all of them that I could find, then got to cleaning the area.   And there it is, two distinct leaks from two joins, right in least-accessible part of course. Oh well, off I went to buy some fuel hose and joiner pieces to sort this problem out. Except every auto parts place I looked didn't stock fuel hose, what the hell? Since when is fuel hose hard to find? I tried every place in the area before giving up. I've ordered some and will have to wait till next time, again. Oh well. In other news, I'm back with my other cars now and will hopefully be throwing new shocks, springs and brakes on the Mercedes over the next couple of days. Also, the BX GTi is scheduled to be transported to me on Thursday, so I can finally get on with fixing the thing myself (or at least trying to). Assuming this transport company doesn't screw me as well. Fingers crossed!
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Dec 17, 2018 17:44
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This all seems (horribly!) familiar. When I did the rear spheres on my Xantia I don't think the wheel spheres had been done in about a decade and I'm pretty sure that the centre rear accumulator (the 'anti-sink' sphere) was the original one from 1996. Do BXs have any of the spheres which instead of just screwing onto the hydraulic connector screw into a holder and then you have to fit an 11mm pipe union into the holder? The Xantia's anti-sink sphere was one of those and both the union and the sphere were seized solid. I've never been brave enough to try the trick of cracking off the spheres with pressure still in the system - I've always just persevered using a blunt chisel and hammer aimed at the 'equator' of the sphere. FYI, my local Citroen specialist here in the UK remanufactures new BX 'Octopi' for about £100. But, as you say, you can basically make your own (and better-sited) octopus from fuel hose and T-pieces... I've just found that most of the driver's-side floor in the 2CV is no longer there...so my plans for a new chassis and a weld-a-thon on the body in the New Year are going to be less pre-emptive than I thought!
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Dec 18, 2018 18:05
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BalloonFish posted:This all seems (horribly!) familiar. When I did the rear spheres on my Xantia I don't think the wheel spheres had been done in about a decade and I'm pretty sure that the centre rear accumulator (the 'anti-sink' sphere) was the original one from 1996. Do BXs have any of the spheres which instead of just screwing onto the hydraulic connector screw into a holder and then you have to fit an 11mm pipe union into the holder? The Xantia's anti-sink sphere was one of those and both the union and the sphere were seized solid. I've never been brave enough to try the trick of cracking off the spheres with pressure still in the system - I've always just persevered using a blunt chisel and hammer aimed at the 'equator' of the sphere. Luckily neither of my BXs has spheres that connect via a holder - that sounds awful. Do you have any pictures? Are you talking about Chevronics? They're good guys but they want 110 quid for the reman octopus, which is what I paid for the car, so I'm going to stick with the home-grown variety! I'm also in prolonged negotiations with them as they have a set of reproduced St. Tropez decals for sale which I'd like, but they're asking £150 which again, is more than the car. I'm trying to get them down on the price by pointing out that there's 6 St. Tropez BXs left on the road so finding a different customer might be a challenge Looking forward to your thread on the 2CV. I really want to learn to weld as well, hopefully this coming year I'll finally have the time and resources to learn. Are you going with reproduction floor pans or just welding in replacement metal? Or are they one and the same on a 2CV?!
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Dec 20, 2018 20:55
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Grakkus posted:Luckily neither of my BXs has spheres that connect via a holder - that sounds awful. Do you have any pictures? The only one of these horrors on the Xantia is the rear 'anti-sink' accumulator - presumably the horribe little pipe union is because the sphere attaches to the brake circuit rather than the suspension system. Obviously the BX doesn't have anti-sink but I know some variaties of CX have the main accumulator sphere attached the same way because of something to do with the DIRAVI steering. Here's the sort of thing you have to do to get the old one off:  Crack the pipe union with the spanner (with about 1/8th turn available within the bracket on which the sphere is mounted - thanks Citroen!) and then once the sphere is loose, take off the pipe union and then unscrew the sphere, making sure that both parts of the pipe union are fully free or you just end up twisting them apart.  It's really hard to get a good pic of the actual union up the back of the sphere - the camera kept wanting to focus on either my hand or the anti-sink valve. But this is putting the new sphere on - screw it in hand-tight, then fiddle the pipe union into place, then do the final tightening on the sphere and then nip up the pipe. Took as long to do this one sphere as the other five on the car put together! Grakkus posted:Are you talking about Chevronics? They're good guys but they want 110 quid for the reman octopus, which is what I paid for the car, so I'm going to stick with the home-grown variety! I'm also in prolonged negotiations with them as they have a set of reproduced St. Tropez decals for sale which I'd like, but they're asking £150 which again, is more than the car. I'm trying to get them down on the price by pointing out that there's 6 St. Tropez BXs left on the road so finding a different customer might be a challenge That's the place! I think it's an inevitable problem that the cars they're catering for aren't worth anything, and given that they're remaking parts in relatively small batches you have to be properly Citroen-crazy to, as you say, pay as much as the car is worth for a bundle of rubber hoses held together with a plastic clip, or for a set of decals. But, having owned other old cars for which certain key parts are simply not available at any price (Austin Metro Hydragas units, for instance...) at least the option is there. Grakkus posted:Looking forward to your thread on the 2CV. I really want to learn to weld as well, hopefully this coming year I'll finally have the time and resources to learn. Are you going with reproduction floor pans or just welding in replacement metal? Or are they one and the same on a 2CV?! This is the state of play at the moment:  I can't really believe that this car passed its inspection less than a year ago without a single comment from the tester about rust! I'm currently weighing up my options. I'd always assumed that when the time came I'd buy a chassis and do the swap myself but the place I'd buy the new galavanised chassis from will also fit it (or rather, fit the rest of the car to the chassis...) in a day's work. I wouldn't be able to do it that fast and don't have anywhere undercover to keep a dismantled 2CV for a couple of weeks, and it's winter! Plus, the more I read about what the job involves it seems that there's quite a difference between what the book says and what actually happens in reality - for instance getting the suspension off the old chassis. Each suspension unit is held on by two 46mm nuts, plus a locking nut of the same size. These will be corroded into an unworkable mess. People have spent hours belting each nut off its threads with a hammer and chisel. So taking the 2CV two hours up the road and having the fully tooled-up experts do it for what is really a very reasonable sum (chassis+fitting coming in at about £900...assuming no other horrors are found) is becoming very tempting. As for the body, looking at how rusty it is I think a new floorpan panel is the way to go - probably two as I suspect the other side won't be far behind. The bit that's gone is actually a patch that was put on by the previous owner, and I've done more patches further back. At this stage, even assuming there's good metal somewhere to work with, doing a repair rather than a replacement gets into patches-on-patches territory. The thing is, all these jobs become much easier when the body is lifted off the chassis. If I do get the specialist to do the chassis swap, we may lift the body off to find that it's completely rotten at the front end. In which case I'll have to weigh up whether it's worth getting them to do the welding alongside the chassis swap - I've been there and seen them do the job on another 2CV. They have a rotating jig which they pop the body on and all the panels/parts/paint to hand. There are other issues as well. 2CV's are (surprise, surprise!) structurally a bit weird. They have a chassis (basically a long rectangular box) which carries all the mechanical parts and the suspension loads but the body is a self-supporting structure which bolts on top of the chassis. The two don't provide any structural support or function for each other. You can drive a 2CV without the body on and the body will sit quite happily on the ground without a chassis. So it's both a body-on-frame and a sort of monocoque. One of the problems you can have is that when someone has welded new metal into the floor of the body they may have, accidentally or through simply not caring because 'I won't be the one to sort it out when the chassis goes...', have welded the body to the top of the chassis. Which makes getting it off very difficult as you basically have to cut the entire floorpan off the car and then weld on a new one! These are all pitfalls I might get in to, so if the quotes and my New Year's budget works out my thread may be more of a commentary on watching the experts do it. I do need to buck up my welding skills. I learnt the basics by putting plates on Land Rover chassis which is really easy - it's all flat, box-section bits of really thick metal. The 2CV floor is flat and square but very thin. I had a go at patching the rear seat belt mounts (which are thin metal, involve several layers of overlapping metal and three-dimensional curves) and I couldn't get it right - ended up paying a friend who is much better at welding to do them for me!
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Dec 22, 2018 00:42
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Well, it's been another tough month for me. I arranged transport for the BX GTi in mid-December as planned, intending to get it back to my garage and do the work myself. However, the transport guy straight up didn't show up this time, and hung up on me and blocked my number when I called him to ask WTF was going on. Real nice guy. Gave him a 1-star review and shittalked him in a bunch of local car communities. Third time was the charm though, and I got a guy to pick it up a week later and deliver it to me on the last day of the year. The delay didn't even end up mattering, though, as I got sick shortly before Christmas and was unable to pick up a spanner until the beginning of January. The Mercedes coupe has been sitting in the garage since the abortive rear handbrake replacement in autumn of last year, so I figured I would sort that out plus the front suspension while it was in there, before bringing in the BX for its surgery. The brake work was all relatively straightforward other than replacing the other trashed handbrake shoe retaining spring, as the new one is pretty powerful and the area you have to work in is very small. Still, after half an hour or so of sweating and swearing it went in. The new rotors and pads went on, and the car could be driven without a horrible scraping and pinging from the rear wheels!     The next job was the front suspension, a job that I've never done before on any car. However, the PelicanParts guide said it was a 2 hour job and gave it a 1/5 difficulty rating, so I dove in with confidence! Confidence that lasted the few minutes it took to jack up the front and undo the shock top mount, then attempt the bolts holding it to the wheel hub. The front suspension on this car is the original stuff it left the factory with, and then drove around on for 30 years in the not-so-ideal central European climate.   Everything there was rust-and-grime-welded to everything else in a way I have never before experienced. Combined with the extremely awkward placement of the bolts, the limited space I had to work with and my lack of a good impact tool (that has since been remedied), this meant it was impossibly difficult to get the bolts to budge. The layout of the flanges and other bits around the bolts means that you have about a 25° range of motion to move a wrench, and the position in the wheel well obviously prohibits using an extension for greater leverage. The forward bolt came off after "only" about an hour of effort on either side, but the top nut+bolt and the aft bolt took literal days of penetrating lubricant, blowtorches, hammering, straining on the wrenches, swearing and pleading before they finally gave up. When the last one finally moved, I was lying underneath the car, thighs against the wheel hub in a sitting position, yanking on the wrench while pushing with my legs, and I'm not exactly small and weak to begin with.   That's the access I had to the aft bolts. Once they had all come out, the body of the shocks were still physically crud- and rust-bonded to the wheel hub and it was a further struggle to get them free:   The old shock was in surprisingly good shape for its 30 years of use - it wasn't leaking and still had plenty of damping ability in it, compressing it by hand it felt only about 30% weaker than the new one. Not for the first time, I was extremely impressed with the build quality of components in the W124 generation Mercs. Next up were springs - W124 springs are slightly bent when they sit in the car and therefore require an internal spring compressor to safely remove as external ones have a good chance of slipping off and murdering you. However, I'm way too cheap to buy the expensive Mercedes tool for a one-time job so I picked up the Sealey-type compressor which uses little hooks to compress the coils instead of the plates of the Mercedes tool.  Fitting it is a little harder than with the OEM tool, which just slides in between the coils - with mine, you have to disassemble the arms, slot them through gaps in the coils, and then reassemble them inside.  Fitted a socket through a hole in the LCA, and tightened it up, and the spring soon came out. Half a coil had broken off at the bottom. This is where I hit my next snag - removing the spring from the car had allowed it to expand slightly and put the compressor under incredible pressure - I didn't have the strength to loosen it one-handed while holding the spring with the other. I didn't have an impact tool and the instructions said I shouldn't use them on the compressor anyway. So I did the only thing I could think of and clamped it in a vice, which allowed me to go at it with both hands:  This felt pretty dodgy to do on an ancient spring under considerable tension but I had no other ideas - I'm sure someone will come along, call me an idiot and tell me a better way of doing it (please?), but it did work and I got the compressor out and into the new spring.  Here I hit upon the same snag, but in reverse - after compressing the spring to about 60% of its original length, it became extremely difficult to compress any further one-handed while holding it with the other hand. It felt ludicrously unsafe to do, cradling the thing in my lap holding it down with one hand while cranking the compressor with the other. The thing felt like a bomb; when I put it down, it would sit there quivering.  I fell into a little routine where I would compress it an inch or so, run out of strength and think to myself "it cannot possibly go any further than this", spend five minutes or so trying to jam it into the car, then take it back out and haul on the compressor and manage to compress it another inch. After about 4 or 5 runs of this, I finally got the drat thing into its seat.  I decompressed the tool, and promptly discovered that the uppermost arm was caught between the spring and the seat. At this point it was about 3am and I had had about enough of spring compressors, so once the rest of the tool was out, I broke out a hammer and thick screwdriver and hammered the poo poo out of it until it had slid along the coil enough to come free. A few more minutes, and the new shock was on along with a fresh boot, bump stop and cleaned up bolts:  I flew out the next day, but my cousin that was driving me to the airport stopped by early and we had a go at the springs on the other side together. Turns out, it's a lot easier to do with one person to hold the spring and the other to turn the compressor  In the half hour we had, we managed to do what would have taken me several hours to do on my own. I'm sure I've been a huge idiot and there are a myriad ways of doing what I did in a safer and easier fashion, but it is what it is, I managed to get it (mostly) done in the end. The whole experience makes me incredibly grateful for Citroen suspension spheres, frankly. I'm flying back this Wednesday, at which point I'll finish the suspension stuff with my cousin, then get the GTi in the shop and get started on that. I've got a week or two before I have to leave again, my spectacularly optimistic hope is to do the whole head gasket + liner oring replacement, fix the leak and have the car road ready by the time I leave. Oh, and after a two month wait, the guy that builds custom louvres finally got in touch with me and told me he was starting on mine. Hurray! Or not - the next day he called and said that because the rear window is glued in to the hatch, instead of being on a rubber seal, he won't do them for me. I asked what it would take, offered him more money but he flat out refused, saying he wouldn't do it at any price. loving arsehole, couldn't have glanced at the rear hatch I sent him two months ago. I'm stubborn as hell though and I've got my heart set on louvres for the car now, so I'm going to get it done one way or another. Originally I was thinking of just making them myself, which I still might do, but my other option is to get the guy doing the bodywork on the Fulvia to do it as he does custom fab work. It's just a question of how much money he would want for it, I'm meeting him later this week to discuss it and the timetable for the Lancia.
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Jan 20, 2019 21:31
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