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browntastic 604


dieselnutjob

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Love finding these threads - obviously only finding them as someone has kindly updated them!!

Read from the start and thoroughly enjoyed it.

 

A very very cool car, delighted that you now have it inside and giving it a longer lease of life.

Jealous of your garage. In fact, jealous of any garage at the moment as I haven't got one!

Most of my yokes are inside, alas not all.

 

Continued good luck with the Peugeot, bookmarked.

 

CFD

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  • 2 weeks later...

This week I went to visit Keith Herbert who must be the biggest Peugeot and specifically 604 nut that I have ever met.

He has this car for sale at the moment https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/motoring/million-kilometre-peugeot

 

Anyway I bought this stash of parts:-

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to go with this stash of parts that I already had:-

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Keiths doors and bonnet have some surface rust but I think are not holed, which makes them better than those on the car.

The only original door that I will have to re-use now is the drivers door, and I have a new skin for that.

 

I don't want any rust in these panels at all, I want this car to last longer that I do so what to do?

 

I am thinking that I should just take every removable panel and get them dipped.  I know that this removes all paint and filler but does it get rid of rust as well?

 

Concerning the driver door should I cut the skin off before dipping the frame and then fit the new frame on after that?

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I forgot to say.  Keith has filled the insides and undersides of everything with wax, which has been great for preserving them, but I think will be a problem for welding and painting anything.

 

That's why I am tempted to dip everything to get rid of the wax so that I can work on stuff.

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Hello Dieselnutjob,

 

I've only just found this thread and it is very informative, funny and useful to me. I used to own a manual 604 ti back in the mid-eighties and it was truly fabulous. It was that silvery green colour, no alloys or aircon but it did have headlight wash-wipers. Pity the doors practically rusted off but in the 4 years I owned it it never broke down once. I've been looking for a good one ever since and just a few months ago bought a gold one from Keith Herbert. You have just purchased the body panels he replaced donkeys years ago but I just never had the space for them. It's great they've gone to someone that can make good use of them. Mine has the same fault as yours in that it almost dies slowing to a junction, I guess the triple carbs need a good overhaul. Keith fitted a manual choke too but cut a dirty great hole in the air filter housing. If I could I would restore it to original.

 

I saw your old one up for sale a couple of years ago but at the time I didn't have anywhere to keep it. Probably the last roadworthy manual and it featured in magazine road tests in the seventies. Last time I saw it someone had thrown a bucket of matt black over it, yuck.

 

Good luck with your resto and it you need any reference pictures just let me know. Keith drenched the whole thing in oil and underseal so never been welded and no rust!

 

Kind regards,

Rob

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  • 11 months later...

Hello Rob.  I forgot to reply to your post when I read it.  Thank you for posting.

This week I got the front valance and two wings back from a friend that runs a bodywork / resto business in the Midlands.

The valance and left wing were new old stock but covered in surface rust and so he got them soda blasted and painted them in two pack primer.

Keith's front wing wasn't so good (though better then mine).  Superficially it looked OK but once stripped it had had some holes plated over and filled.  My friend Chris removed all of that, cut back to clean metal and shaped and welded in new metal, this one is also now in two pack primer.

He also painted the insides with a coat of stone chip.

He told me that I need to paint the insides in their final colour though because twin pack primer doesn't actually seal the panel.  For that it needs a layer of lacquer.

So I was looking for pics of 604s in various factory colours and came across this Dutch link https://www.octanemagazine.nl/de-604gti-van-opa/

Gorgeous isn't it?

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  • 5 months later...

I have made very little progress this year so far.

However today I cleared out the last of my rubbish from the garden which means a deal done with SWMBO.  Also work has been insane since lockdown but I have decided to just start booking in leave in the calendar anyway.

This Thursday I have booked a day's leave and a mate to come teach me how to weld.

This evening I jacked up the back of the car.  I am short of storage space so the easiest place to put my new axle stands is under the car.

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Things that I am planning to achieve this summer:-

finish off the garage door

pull the engine out

weld up anything needing welding in the engine bay

Paint the engine bay

 

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I was reading the process to remove the engine on a 604.

You are supposed to remove the bonnet and pull it out the top.

However to get the engine off of the gearbox you have drop the steering rack, front cross member and radiator so that you can pull the engine forwards.

I am thinking that I have to pull the cross member off I might as well just put the cross member on some sort of stand and lift the body off, dropping the engine underneath.

I don't have somewhere to work on the engine (the garage isn't big enough) so I have either pull it out the top, build a table over the front of the car and work on it there, or I can drop it on the floor and lift the front of the car as high as possible and work on the engine on the ground.

I'm not sure which is least bad.

To lift things I have a 80x80mm steel box section running across the garage.  

The box section is 2.1m above the ground and I could mount pulley wheels onto it so that a hand winch can go horizontally along the beam so not loosing the length of the winch.

Also I could just use some big ratchet straps somewhere on the body shell slung over the 80x80

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This 80x80mm steel rests inside the i of a pair of 152x152 beams (what most people would call an RSJ) that hold up the roof.  This are the 37kg per metre ones which I think are normally used to support pretty big buildings so I don't think there will be any issue there.

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  • 10 months later...

I have taken a week off work.

Ordered this last week and hung it from my 80x80mm square tube.

I modified it by removing the chain at the top and putting a pulley wheel.

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The wire is pulled by a fence puller which will see half the weight of the engine due the above mentioned pulley.

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got the bonnet off

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I struggled a bit with the fan shroud because the bottom screw just span, so I removed the fan instead.  Once I got the rad out I realised why:-

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it's designed just to snap in and out which I couldn't see from where I was

So at this point I finished for the day.

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A colleague (or rather an employee for a supplier) offered me a 1 ton chain winch so after dinner I popped over to his place to pick it up and it turns out that his neighbour is a serial Citroen licker

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One thing that surprised me is that so far none of the nuts and bolts have given me any hassle.  The only thing seized was a hose clamp which snapped rather than undoing.  Maybe the spirit of Keith Herbert is interceding for me from above.

Seriously my 16 year old Jag causes me more hassle with rusted up stuff than this 46 year old Pug.  With the Jag I have started a policy that as far as possible any bolt removed is tossed and replaced with a new one.  Given how well the originals have lasted on the 604 I think I would be better off putting the original ones back.

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I think that the brake booster is going to have to come out.

If I had room for a proper engine hoist I could pull the engine forward and then up, but with my lash up I can only really do a straight lift up.

The booster is in the way.

I just went around the engine bay spraying stuff with penetrating oil so that it can work overnight.

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Today I didn't make as much progress as hoped.

I got the brake booster after a bit of a fight.  This clip pinged off and I spent an hour looking for it but it's gone.

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I think I would like a garage floor made of magnetised steel sheet so that when something falls it doesn't bounce but just "sticks" where it falls.

Still, there is a lot more room without it

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The power steering pump is actually underneath the battery tray, which is welded to the shell.

 

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so there is not way that the engine will left up with that attached to the engine.

It came off okay

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The power steering pipes are all attached to things with 17mm nuts and they are all really tight.  I haven't succeeded in undoing any of them.

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so ordered some "flare nut spanners" off Amazon prime. 

I also had a look at the rack/engine interference situation.  There are two lugs on the bottom of the engine for attaching to the transmission and they hang down lower that the top of the rack, and basically I think that the engine will only come back 2cm before hitting the rack.

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I spent a couple of hours trying to drop the rack and failed

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the rack is right at the bottom of this photo.

the power steering ram is sandwiched between the rack and the cross member

you can see one of the bolts that holds the rack onto the cross member in the photo, and above that is much longer bolt that attaches the ram to the cross member by going all the way through it

That long bolt can't come out because it hits the rack, and the nut is underneath all those pipes.

I think that's why Peugeot say to drop the whole cross member.  However the engine is sitting on it and getting to the engine mount bolts looks pretty difficult.  You can hardly see them let alone get tools on them.

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I will have a look at that later. Thanks!

Today I removed the entire exhaust.  It took me about 5 hours.

Now I have entire exhaust from the exhaust manifolds all the way to very strange back boxes off and in individual parts.

These things take some time when you are on your back under the car on axle stands and you don't want to break anything.  You can't just pop down to PartCo and buy a new exhaust for an early 604.

I can now see the engine mount bolts; hooray.

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6 hours ago, mk2_craig said:

How much structural work do you think is required within the engine bay DNJ?

I need to get a wire wheel on there before I can answer that.  I know from experience the rust is always 100 time worse than it first appears.

4 hours ago, Dead_E23 said:

How have you been getting on with your Milwaukee ratchet?  Is it making stuff any easier?

It's a brilliant, brilliant tool. I love it.  I am using a DeWalt 1/2" hammer driver thing for the big stuff, and the Milwaukee for everything else.  The only problem is that in some really tight spots (and there are plenty on a 604) it's too big to get in there.

The DeWalt LED torch is crap.  The detents on the swivel head are too weak and it's like a drunk mate who just falls over all the time when you ask him for help.

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Photos from yesterday

I thought that the manifold nuts would be impossible.

They just laughed at a ring spanner.

However I was able to got a blowtorch on them and with a combination of 3/8" extensions and UJs, or a 1/2" if I got lucky they all came off.  It was just a case of finding gaps like this

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exhaust off

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