That is one thing that annoys me with most Tractionistes - they only use the car in the summer on special weekends. I plan to get this totally smart on the inside, underside and the under the bonnet. But for the first year at least, it is going to be beaten up and tatty on the outside. Just so we can have some fun going to the shops and messing about in. We drive all our little old cars (except for my 4L which is poorly at the moment)

When I was wiring my place in France we used miles of conduit and then threaded the wires through it, so they couldn't go astray. Mindy you, that's a lot easier when you're talking about brand new plasterboard walls.

Yup, same, I rewired the whole house to French spec. But 10 years on we need to change the layout so threading through twin and earth instead just on one wall.

The conduit took a long time to thread when we did it, then found out you can buy it pre threaded

I had a second go at installing the pistons. This time I used a trick from an oldie French guy who said toe use some cutting paste (same as you use on the valves/seats) to mate up the edges of the piston sleeves with the crankcase. This seemed to work quite well. But on measuring the height above the top surface I am still a bit low so I have ordered some thicker gaskets - my current ones that came with the gasket kit are 0.02 so I have some 0.07 on order. So this job will have to wait..... again.



Onto my oil pump - now this was disgusting as it had sat in a mixture of oil and water for the past 46 years. Hence the filter mesh is rusted out and the upper filter hood and upper cover are corroded so have ordered new. The rest of the pump looks in good order so I stripped cleaned and rebuilt with new gaskets.




Onto removing the rusty old coolant tube inside the head. What a ridiculous design this is. A job I was not looking forward to at all.

This is the tube that runs from end to end within the head and distributes coolant through 4 little holes. One end is open to the water pump and the other butts up against a core plug. So first things first was removing the core plug. I watched a dozen tutorials on You Tube showing how easy it was. All of them were on big US engines where the core plugs are the size of dinner plates. Mine ate 25mm and 30mm. It took some hammering, heat and a lot of swearing but I got the end one out.

I then had to take the top core plug out to dismantle bit by bit the rusted tube. I used a metal down rod to tap out the remnants of the tube and pulled the pieces out where I could with pliers. What a crappy job but all done with 4 core plugs to replace.

Here you can see the rusted tube inside the head, it was like this all the way along.



Here is the tube and the core plugs, the way they ended up



And finally the light at the end of the tunnel



Have ordered new core plugs and a new tube. I then went onto clean the outside of the head and paint it the normal green. Day off tomorrow so leave it all to dry before rebuilding the head and then climbing underneath the car to finish off the floor.

The placement of this tube and the direction and position of the holes in it are very important. If placed wrong it can give problems in cooling with blown head gaskets as a result.

What worries me about this project, Ian, is what are you going to do NEXT winter? You're going to be very bored...unless you get hold of another project over the summer!

I can't let this one drag out that long

Maybe a 4CV next winter if I sell my Dyane and a couple of my road bikes.

Or I could just bring one of mine down and leave it with you over winter. Wouldn't want to see you getting bored

Maybe a daft questions..... or not

Traction radiator is mounted up front with the fan placed to the rear (operated from the end of the water pump). So air flows into the radiator and but also blown forward from the fan (or is is sucked?? )

So my question is, I would like to put on an electric fan pinned onto the from of the radiator (nearest the grill) Can I keep the original fan blowing two or will both fans conflict with each other.

In my world the orginal fan (of a Traction) is mounted after the radiator and it sucks
So you can mount an electric fan infront of the radiator which blows. This is very common done (even the DS with injection has this) so it doesn't bite each other..