I can’t say for sure if there is some supernatural entity that watches over humans attempts to wrench on their cars, but if there is I feel like they must be some manner of miserable, cruel being, gorged on stolen 10mm sockets and deriving joy from our pain. I say this because this weekend instead of doing the things I wanted to do on my Citroën 2CV, I attempted to make some repairs to my ’89 Ford F-150 that ended up in mild disaster. Oy.
I still have a healthy list of things I need to do on the 2CV – install a new voltage regulator (it’s on order), assemble the headlight angle doohickey the proper way, change the gear oil, replace the CV boots, and so on. But I have other vehicles that need attention, like my purple-ish pickup truck that I need to do pickup truck things.
I replaced the water pump on the truck a number of months ago, and after a short period of trouble-free operation, it started creating a mobile sauna everywhere I went, and it looked like the cause was coolant escaping from the thermostat housing. It seemed like a bad gasket.
Also, somehow the serpentine belt has become strangely ragged, and while I’m not sure why this happened, it happened, so I decided to replace this raggedy belt:
The belt replacement went fine, so that was good at least. I removed the thermostat housing and removed the old gasket, which, as you can see, wasn’t in great shape:
That’s non-ideal, and if I were steam, I’d escape from there, too. The new gasket looked downright luxurious:
I got a new thermostat as well, and as I was installing it in the housing and getting it all back together, I remember thinking those bolts weren’t quite as tight as they probably should have been, which may have contributed to the escaping coolant. So I decided to use a breaker bar and get them nice and snug.
This was a mistake.
As I was tightening the lower bolt, I decided to give it one more good twist, and that’s when I heard the snick sound that make my heart drop. Did I crack the housing?
I cracked the housing.
I’m an idiot. It’s a cast part, and I should have known better. In an act of wild, unhinged optimism, I started the truck and drove it around the block, just to see if the crack would actually allow coolant to escape.
It did. Crap. I guess I need to get a new thermostat housing.
So, that’s frustrating. I was running out of daylight and free time, but I wanted to do some stuff on the 2CV, so I did some little things I’ve been meaning to do. Small things, but fun things. One was an excuse to 3D print a part.
The rear interior door handles for the 2CV are sort of strange. They’re these little levers on the underside of the latching mechanism (the upper lever is to lock/unlock) and they have a little black plastic knob/lever thing on their ends.
I was missing the one on the driver’s side rear door; with the plastic part gone, it’s just a little metal tab that’s hard to see and get your finger around. They’re kind of difficult to notice anyway for 2CV-unfamiliar rear seat passengers, which are the vast majority of people around here. So, to make them more obvious, I printed new plastic levers in red.
They seem to work pretty well!
Classy, right?
I also decided to set up my sound system/in-car navigation/center stack screen setup. That’s just an aggrandized way of saying some place to hold/charge my phone and a Bluetooth speaker:
I still need to find neater ways to tuck those wires out of the way, but I found the wiper motor cover makes a great mounting place for a magnetic phone charger, and I shoved a cheap BT speaker in the oddments tray. The setup seems to work pretty well!
The phone’s position is good, providing an easy view of a map if needed, and the speaker makes music or podcasts audible over the not-really-whisper-quiet air-cooled flat-twin. I plan on daily driving this thing, so this sort of thing is important.
Oh, and for reasons I don’t understand and don’t really want to question, the interior light and hazard lights decided to start to work again after months and months of dormancy. I did nothing special to make this happen, but I’m not complaining!
I need to fix the truck before next weekend. Hopefully the new thermostat housing will do it!
Hopefully, it’s relatively pain free to source a new thermostat housing for the Marshall, I also wonder how well JB weld would hold up for a temporary solution, it’s probably not worth trying if you don’t have to, but wouldn’t it be great if that sealed it up!
Reassembling the Brat engine this weekend and over torqued one of the oil pan bolts. I guess it was a good thing because when I pulled the oil pan back off I realized I forgot the oil pickup tube/strainer.
After a reverse drill bit and an easy out didn’t work I just ran down to Auto Zone for a thread repair kit. $34! I guess they know how to price the stuff you need today.
Last night I was admiring the engine finally in the car almost ready to go with one shiny oil pan bolt and realized the exhaust wont connect because I put one of the manifolds on the wrong way. Looking forward to another day of bone headedness in the garage!
One ugga dugga to many.
Looking at that belt, check your other pulleys and power steering pump for binding or a burr.
At the Torch School of Automotive Repair chainsaws are for opening lead-acid batteries, breaker bars are for bolts you want to tighten, and everyone’s grades are kept on salami.
Hail, Hail Jasonia! (sung to the tune of that Freedonia song from Duck Soup.)
Back in the early 1990s I had a similar experience with a thermostat housing on the 250 straight-six in my old 1967 C-10 pickup. When I tried to remove the old thermostat housing to replace my thermostat, one of the bolts just snapped right off.
Luckily for me, on those motors, there’s both an upper thermostat housing and a lower thermostat housing.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/6OgAAOSwC9hb7O79/s-l1600.webp
I did not own a tap/die set back then, but I was able to get that lower housing off without breaking any bolts. It was early on a Saturday, and the salvage yard was open Saturday mornings, but it was almost an hour from where I lived. When I called them, they said that yes, they did have a few 250s in the yard and that I would have to pull one myself, so bring my tools. They also said that due to an off-road race, they would be closing early in about 30 minutes so if I wanted one, I needed to get there right away.
When I explained that I was about an hour away, the owner asked me, “Are you that guy with that blue ’67?” (I had been getting parts from him for a while now) I replied that I was. He said, “You’re good. Just get here when you get here, jump the fence, take what you need, and just pay me the next time you’re in the area.”
So I borrowed my mom’s car, drove down there, got my parts, (luckily the dogs were friendly and no cops drove by while I was jumping the fence) made it back home, swapped out the housings, (had to use RTV for the lower gasket) fired it up – and it worked! No leaks!
About two weeks later I was near that junkyard so I stopped in to pay the owner. I had to remind him as he had forgotten all about it. When I asked how much he wanted for both housings, he said, “5 bucks.”
I miss junkyards like that.
Oh, those were the days. Great story, too.
Torque wrenches are inexpensive and plentiful.
Cheap, sketchy torque wrenches are more inexpensive and plentifuller on Amazon.
I thought I was a clumsy wrench but even I know you never use a breaker bar to tighten things. At least it was something on the F150 that AutoZone is likely to have, not something on the 2CV that would have to come from France.
We’ve all been three, most recently for me was a brake caliper bolt on the girlfriend’s Pacifica. They just kept tightening, and never seemed to bottom out, so in a boneheaded act of complete idiocy I gave the front driver’s side bolt one last tug, just to be sure; and it snapped right off. Proceed to 45 minutes of Uber rides to and from Autozones to get a replacement and the job was sorted. Fortunately the rent a lift shop humored us and didn’t charge us extra for the near hour we were gone fetching parts. I mean an extra $7 wasn’t gonna kill us, but they were as surprised as I was when I explained what had happened.
So I also have a JBL Charge for my 2CV, although since I normally run with the top down, the mixture of wind noise and French steel duet make music hard to hear.
Indeed, every new person in my 2CV gets the “safety demonstration” because nobody can find the front or rear door handles. And nobody can find the rear seatbelts, which is fair as there aren’t any.
I’ve joked about making a laminated “safety card” for the car. If I were The Bishop instead of his Brother, I’d have the skilz to pull it off
Q: Where are the rear seat belts?!?
A: Je vous salue, Marie
Pleine de grâce ;
Le Seigneur est avec vous.
Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes,
Et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni.
Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu,
Priez pour nous pauvres pécheurs,
Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort.
Amen.
“I normally run with the top down…” as the actress said to your brother.
No torque wrenches!?
Let me introduce you to my good friend: the torque wrench.
That’s what you want to use if you need to snug up some bolts. Breaker bars are for breaking things – it’s right there in the name!
Glad you’re getting that gorgeous little C2V up and running! That’s one of the cars that alway brings a smile to my face when I see them on the road, which so far is “never”. The other is the FIAT 500, which I see a lot of around where I live in Colorado.
What about any Torch wrenching content has you thinking he has a torque wrench to hand or in mind? I love the man, but that’s not his vibe.
I could say that there’s a Torque Wrench, and there’s a Torch Wrench and they are different things