Schaefft's Bargain Barge Extravaganza - Citroen C6 finally sorted?

[Schaefft]

55 minutes ago, JMotor said:

Kinda wish I brought one of these wheels with me. Just to try on the Q45.

Bother is. They are VERY JDM and are a weak spec of wheel too. 

 

Ha, I had the choice of a similar style wheel when I bought the car (that's what it was riding on here in the UK before I bought it), I declined naturally. I wouldn't be opposed to something a little closer to this though...

I'd want to stick to a factory wheel option though. The Q45 and President came with some decent alloys, including BBS ones. I'd be happy with either.

[JMotor]

To be honest.

I agree. It needs to be back to stock height and with a OEM wheel choice. 

I have to be going soft. As I'd been fully on board with the first picture of a lowered one on the chromies 😆.

[Gompo]

Always enjoy seeing what you bring to FotU, looking forward to checking out the Infiniti. Good luck with the MoT!

[Schaefft]

Rockauto once again delivered in record time, with me ordering parts on a Thursday evening and receiving the front caliper and rebuild kit needed to get the Infiniti going on Monday noon. Unfortunately only one of the two parcels arrived as FedEx for God knows what reason held one of them at their import facility for 2 days, so no new pistons for the driver side caliper that was NLA...

Luckily I was able to scavenge one decent piston from the caliper I did have a replacement for. I don't have compressed air yet so pushing them out using the brakes was my only option here...

No wonder the front brakes were seized nearly solid. I'm not sure how old the brake fluid was (still looked good in the reservoir) but that's the end result. The seals all looked good still. I've had to use the right and middle piston, both cleaned up well enough to be reusable for now.

The bore surfaces still looked spot on so no issues there. I've blasted it all with brake cleaner and wiped any remaining dirt out.

Here's where things got tricky. The damn dust covers wouldn't fully snap into the ridge around the bore no matter how hard I tried. Chances are I would have torn them to pieces long before they seat properly. It's a dust cover so it'll be alright for a while but should I ever find a rebuilt right front caliper those will be my reason to replace it. With replacements around 50 quid it's just not worth the hassle.

The other side naturally was easy, a fully refurb'd caliper for under £50, what more could you want.

I'll do the rear calipers another time (they seem to drag a little as well). They too are cheap so by the time I'm done it'll have new calipers and brake fluid all around. This will be the only maintenance item I needed to have done to the car so far, everything else is related to the dumb mods I'm planning to revert. Those crappy headlights LEDs that have already partially failed will be next.

For now the Q45 is ready for Fotu though. It'll be the first long trip since I picked it up in Birmingham a few years ago.

[MAF260]

5 hours ago, Schaefft said:

 

That front end is very reminiscent of a facelift Rover 800.

[Schaefft]

Fotu25 has come and gone and I've had a great time there talking to people about both their cars (Dutch guy with a Lancia Y, another person with a manual X300 like mine, the Senator B dude being so thankful about me referring him to Senatorman.de for diagnostics help (the issue was a junk-out-of-box Febi temp sensor he just installed in the end)). The Q45 did great, no issues whatsover on the 500+ mile round trip aside from the occasional lack of traction pulling out when the roads were wet😂

I thought it needed rear calipers as they were a bit sticky as well, that problem might have sorted itself now that its done a few miles again.

In other news, the Citroen C6 has finally returned! After a few session of diagnosing why the electronic parking brake had a mind of its own it all came down to it needing cables. 250 quid later and the parking brake works again, which meant that (after all the work I've done 2 months earlier) its good for another year on the road.

Oddly enough this is currently the most practical car I own thats actually on the road (ZTT waiting for front springs, 540i Touring and Alfa 156 waiting for MOT work). The fold-down back seat makes all the difference so it was immediately pressed into use hauling more car parts:

It still needs tyres (might buy a complete set of C6 or late model 18" C5 wheels if I can find one) and the coolant flange replacing. The latter arrived yesterday so I might be able to throw it in the car by the end of the week. This might be the last thing I will do on the Citroen before it goes up for sale. With the next liability purchase already on the horizon it and the XJR will likely be put up for sale once they are sorted.

[Schaefft]

The latter continues to be a bit of a pain. The MAF from @horriblemercedes helped me narrow down that it indeed is the cause for the running issues that I had with it. The XJR doesn't struggle with the throttle anymore now that maf #3 is doing its job, I'll continue to monitor things for a while to make sure things actually stay fixed.

However since sorting one thing apparently upset the balance of Jaguar reliability the passenger front window immediately decided to not close anymore. There's also an ABS light illuminated now (I haven't even touched anything remotely related to the abs) so that needs looking into as well.

Very much one step forward, two steps back then. Fingers crossed the abs light is something simple and I can return this thing to full functionality sooner rather than later.

[horriblemercedes]

This company in the Netherlands claims to be able to repair them:

https://www.ecu-rc.nl/Control/5370/jaguar-lna-1620-aa/?tid=1

 

Could be worth trying them? 

[Schaefft]

The window lifter on the XJR somehow fixed itself so I'll call that a win. Do you know what else is a win? Finally owning a Citroen C6 that doesn't leak coolant.

Unfortunately the path to get there wasn't the easiest, it might one of the harder jobs you'll eventually have to do on every C5/C6 with the 2.7 diesel. The next owner can count themselves lucky that I've just done it. Its coming from a plastic-welded coolant pipe right at the front of the engine bay, fairly far down the block. Lets see what accessibility looks like:

Shit. It was pretty clear to me from the beginning that the radiator would need to come out, even with the easier to remove covers gone things were still looking grim (you can't even catch a glimps of it there):

Moving everything attached to the radiator out of the way and unbolting the whole assembly from all its mounts to tilt it forward helped enormously. I don't know why but PSA/Citroen decided that you can't seemingly remove the radiator from the top, as far as I can tell it just drops out of the bottom, making it all unnecessarily complicated for anyone without a ramp.

You still can't see the coolant pipe there but the thick hose right in the bottom center attaches to it. This job basically needs to be done without direct line of sight, you need a camera phone with a torch to see where the bolts are located. The top one is fairly easy to reach with a few extensions, the bottom one however is hiding behind the damn exhaust manifold!

Fortunately there is just about enough space to get past it with plenty of extensions and a wiggly thing, its almost impossible from above but lying underneath the car using a torch you can just about see what you are doing. Once that second bolt is out the pipe just pulls out.

As is so often the case the leak was more or less the result of a total bodge and would have been entirely avoidable. Someone clearly had it out before and elected to silicon the thing (while breaking the seal to the block which then probably caused a worse leak). One of the coolant hoses is still attached to it there, its impossible to remove with the pipe still in place so it'll need to be transferred over to the replacement pipe before its getting installed.

That's where it needs to go. I carefully scraped the remaining silicon out of the port, you can see the clever* placement of the second bolt on the right as well.

New (genuine PSA!) pipe installed, it doesn't easily push back into place so I've used the bolts to carefully press it back in, naturally all without actually ever seeing any of it. The rest is the reversal of removal, getting the bonnet catch to work as intended was another 20 minutes of fun but it was good see the engine bay reassembled after probably 4 hours of hell.

I had the car running for 30mins to get it up to temperature and confirm there was no leak. Not a single drip anymore, thank god. This was the last job the car needed to be fully functional as a long distance cruiser again. That doesn't mean that its perfect (still no working A/C) but after the parking brake, suspension bushing, PDC and all the cosmetic improvements (still terrible) it'll be the last big job I wanted to get done on it.

I'll try to put a few miles on before it's being put up for sale (just so I can enjoy a somewhat sorted C6 for a little while). With a new low cost, high liability vehicle likely incoming soon I would need the space back relatively soon as well though.