Peugeot 406 Coupe - 3.0L V6. Complete refurb... very slowly
Discussion
On the same topic as the above, a few more people asked about replacement tanks (they've not been available for a while and they're all faulty from the factory in the same ways) - the stainless one on mine is a no go as it takes some serious work to form the ends nicely, machined tube fittings, and the clamp where it attaches to the car has to be heavily modified and welded to, to attach a v-band clamp.
So, as an alternative, I did some CAD work, made some improvements to the design along the way to strengthen some areas, reduce stress concentrations by removing sharp corners, and changing the fault prone ultrasonic weld joint for a bolted, o-ringed flange connection - plus some internal improvements for better flow, I had a prototype in hand.
This isn't the final material, some cheaper stuff I had to check the process in - but I'm intending to use a similar material to the OE, albeit more water resistant (about half the saturation of the OE plastic) and using chopped carbon fibres instead of glass fibres, to give me a bit more strength, since it's not worth the few pence saving when you aren't making thousands, and it'll help compensate for the inherent strength disadvantage vs injection moulded parts.
Got a few tweaks I want to make but I'm pretty happy with that for the first attempt.
Gotta check the other half now but should go just as well I think, and give me a finished part that resembles this:
So, as an alternative, I did some CAD work, made some improvements to the design along the way to strengthen some areas, reduce stress concentrations by removing sharp corners, and changing the fault prone ultrasonic weld joint for a bolted, o-ringed flange connection - plus some internal improvements for better flow, I had a prototype in hand.
This isn't the final material, some cheaper stuff I had to check the process in - but I'm intending to use a similar material to the OE, albeit more water resistant (about half the saturation of the OE plastic) and using chopped carbon fibres instead of glass fibres, to give me a bit more strength, since it's not worth the few pence saving when you aren't making thousands, and it'll help compensate for the inherent strength disadvantage vs injection moulded parts.
Got a few tweaks I want to make but I'm pretty happy with that for the first attempt.
Gotta check the other half now but should go just as well I think, and give me a finished part that resembles this:
Edited by PhillipM on Tuesday 13th February 01:52
TGCOTF-dewey said:
3D printing really is a game changer.
That looks superb Phil. How's the eye BTW?
Also where is the buggy at - not seen an update in a while?
My eyes are good, they're still not perfect - I really struggle with them adjusting quickly in the dark, but they're getting better all the time for it, so hopefully it keeps going.That looks superb Phil. How's the eye BTW?
Also where is the buggy at - not seen an update in a while?
The buggy is still going I've just been way too busy with looking after family, travelling and job hunting to do much over winter, but Ed's still cracked on with it, got most of the maintainance out of the way, and the gearbox came back the other day with the short ratio 3rd and 4th fitted so I need to get up and give him a hand to get that in.
We didn't really plan a lot of work over winter this time as Ed was busy working on a new race car for a friend anyway.
PhillipM said:
My eyes are good, they're still not perfect - I really struggle with them adjusting quickly in the dark, but they're getting better all the time for it, so hopefully it keeps going.
The buggy is still going I've just been way too busy with looking after family, travelling and job hunting to do much over winter, but Ed's still cracked on with it, got most of the maintainance out of the way, and the gearbox came back the other day with the short ratio 3rd and 4th fitted so I need to get up and give him a hand to get that in.
We didn't really plan a lot of work over winter this time as Ed was busy working on a new race car for a friend anyway.
Glad to hear they're better-ish. The buggy is still going I've just been way too busy with looking after family, travelling and job hunting to do much over winter, but Ed's still cracked on with it, got most of the maintainance out of the way, and the gearbox came back the other day with the short ratio 3rd and 4th fitted so I need to get up and give him a hand to get that in.
We didn't really plan a lot of work over winter this time as Ed was busy working on a new race car for a friend anyway.
I was going to ask about Jobs... I'd assumed a man of your talents would be gainfully employed in a heart beat.
You still not found one?
k off" 
PhillipM said:
One of the newer modified PA12's (well, PPA alloys, really) with chopped carbon, they take a bit more temperature to print and need 50-80c chambers but they'll do 140c HDT.
Very impressive. What's your setup? I was looking at making some inlet manifolds (head to itb adaptors really) out of 3d printed material but convinced myself I'd need something like the hp jet fusion for those temps but if your desktop (presumably!) setup can do the job I clearly need to do more research...Edited by PhillipM on Friday 16th February 11:50
We have markforged at work which does the chopped carbon thing but I've never been super impressed, it's all very well having carbon aligned with the strands but the adhesion is the weak point and I can't see the benefit of the chopped carbon in that context.
The nylons can be bad for moisture absorbing too imo, get very flexible after a few weeks just left on a desk.
shalmaneser said:
The nylons can be bad for moisture absorbing too imo, get very flexible after a few weeks just left on a desk.
Yea the modded PA12's are better for that, this tank should hit equilibrium around 3-4% rather than the 8% ish of the old PA6.6 tank, and retain a lot more strength. I actually conditioned them by boiling them water for about 6 hours and they're still very stiff compared to the OE tank.Specs here for some of the better HTNs these days:
https://essentium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/T...
https://www.3dxtech.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05...
I'm just running modified P1S's for the stuff that needs a chamber, better nozzles, insulated chamber, etc, etc, nothing too complex - and a couple of my older duel extruder machines that are setup mainly for TPU production parts. The biggest think with end use parts tbh is making sure they're annealed properly which can be tricky.
Edited by PhillipM on Saturday 17th February 15:13
Okay, before I got off timeline with the exhaust and other bits, I was documenting the work I think shortly after doing the rear brakes and modding the stereo to work properly.
Anyway, I was hunting down a bit of a misfire, which I traced down to a leaking pipe on the idle control valve, unfortunately, that pipe is not available any more *AND* it converts between two different fitting sizes, and because the ICV sits right by the side of the manifold, there's no room to link adaptors and off the shelf pipe together....so I 3d printed one of those too. Once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail....
And since the ICV itself seemed to have a lot of play in the bearings, I swapped it out for a new one. But not the Peugeot one, which you can't get any more. What you can get, ironically, given how many 406 ended up dressed up as them, is a Ferrari 360 control valve, which after a bit of research into various parts, I found was electrically identical and plugs right in, and has almost the same airflow rating, close enough anyway. Only problem is the valve inlet is 90* out compared to the OE one. So I printed a 180* U-bend in polyurethane and fitted that to convert it too
While I was under there I also found that some of the nylon breather hoses under the inlet manifold had gone brittle and split, so I popped the manifold off, replaced them with silicone hose instead (again, no longer available) and then because I was there anyway and the inlet manifold to head piece wasn't all that well port matched - the ports were misaligned a fair bit, I blued up and ported both that, the inlet manifold/plenum itself to that part:
...and I also reworked the throttle body, because it was designed for a very, very soft off idle response curve and as such had a large ramp covering about 1/3rd of the throttle body area.
That made rev matching very lazy and the whole engine response at low throttle openings a bit sluggish. Great for old ladies cruising around town, not what I like, anyway a bit of work with a diegrinder and dremel and everything looked far better, I cleaned up a lot of flashing on the inlet trumpet side in the plenum too, while I was there.
And since it evidently needed a little bit of a service, it got new plugs, a new NGK coil pack, new OE leads (aftermarkets are hit and miss on this and it uses one coil to fire two plugs so they need to be good), and I decided to treat it to a cambelt kit too.
It's a good job I did, because I found a cracked through exhaust cam pulley where someone hadn't torqued it properly:
One new belt, waterpump and tensioner later...
Which wasn't too easy, it's a tight fit, the engine mount has to come out, oh, and you can't get the original hydraulic tensioner any more. So you have to grind a bit of the engine block away and fit a new style sprung one. Oh and there's 3 different sizes of waterpump, and the bigger one mine has runs into that new tensioner. So you have to grind the tensioner to fit it too.
Aren't these cars fun?
Anyway, as the more eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted, the inlet cam timing got advanced a bit too, to bring a bit more midrange torque to the table.
After reassembling it all, the engine was night and day different, nice, clean response to a stab of the throttle, maybe a little on the slow side but very linear now, and pulled harder up top to the redline, it really felt like it didn't like being strung out much past 6k before that.
Unfortunately, everything really stopped there, the same day my grandad had a heart attack and my mother had a stroke while we were waiting for the ambulance with him, my grandad took a while to recover and I spent I think 10 days by my mothers side without sleeping because I had to watch her for choking on fluid in her lungs constantly, she never woke up and the car just got left for probably half a year while I sorted things out, didn't really have any enthusiasm for it, and I ended up with nerve damage in my left shoulder that meant I lost my grip randomly in my left hand for a year or more which really compounded things. Whilst I did some bits and pieces, speaker upgrades, seat repairs, general servicing and few other bits and pieces and repairs, I didn't document anything really, wasn't in the mindset for anything bar the odd distraction for a long time, as you can guess.
Oh, and the bin collection lorry drove into the back arch of the Coupe and all but wrote it off because it wasn't worth repairing at values at the time, just to seal the deal, I think I got a payout of 600-700 quid or something, even after arguing it for being a rare car with documented work. I just took a payout from 'em and pushed it out myself.
Anyway, I kept trawling amazon for things at night when I wasn't sleeping and dropped on some serious bargains, and slowly built up this lot for about 200 quid I think. which finally motivated me to get back under the car and do something, so it got new front springs, new top mounts front and rear, top mount bearings, new droplinks front and rear, KYB front dampers and Bilstien rears, new front balljoints, and new front arb bushes too:
That was pretty much most of the wearing bushes and parts on the suspension side refreshed by then.
While I was under there I noticed some of the air con hose and water hose bushes were very tired too, to the point one kept falling out its bracket - and well, hammer and nail, remember?
Out came the printed parts again:
Anyway, I was hunting down a bit of a misfire, which I traced down to a leaking pipe on the idle control valve, unfortunately, that pipe is not available any more *AND* it converts between two different fitting sizes, and because the ICV sits right by the side of the manifold, there's no room to link adaptors and off the shelf pipe together....so I 3d printed one of those too. Once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail....
And since the ICV itself seemed to have a lot of play in the bearings, I swapped it out for a new one. But not the Peugeot one, which you can't get any more. What you can get, ironically, given how many 406 ended up dressed up as them, is a Ferrari 360 control valve, which after a bit of research into various parts, I found was electrically identical and plugs right in, and has almost the same airflow rating, close enough anyway. Only problem is the valve inlet is 90* out compared to the OE one. So I printed a 180* U-bend in polyurethane and fitted that to convert it too
While I was under there I also found that some of the nylon breather hoses under the inlet manifold had gone brittle and split, so I popped the manifold off, replaced them with silicone hose instead (again, no longer available) and then because I was there anyway and the inlet manifold to head piece wasn't all that well port matched - the ports were misaligned a fair bit, I blued up and ported both that, the inlet manifold/plenum itself to that part:
...and I also reworked the throttle body, because it was designed for a very, very soft off idle response curve and as such had a large ramp covering about 1/3rd of the throttle body area.
That made rev matching very lazy and the whole engine response at low throttle openings a bit sluggish. Great for old ladies cruising around town, not what I like, anyway a bit of work with a diegrinder and dremel and everything looked far better, I cleaned up a lot of flashing on the inlet trumpet side in the plenum too, while I was there.
And since it evidently needed a little bit of a service, it got new plugs, a new NGK coil pack, new OE leads (aftermarkets are hit and miss on this and it uses one coil to fire two plugs so they need to be good), and I decided to treat it to a cambelt kit too.
It's a good job I did, because I found a cracked through exhaust cam pulley where someone hadn't torqued it properly:
One new belt, waterpump and tensioner later...
Which wasn't too easy, it's a tight fit, the engine mount has to come out, oh, and you can't get the original hydraulic tensioner any more. So you have to grind a bit of the engine block away and fit a new style sprung one. Oh and there's 3 different sizes of waterpump, and the bigger one mine has runs into that new tensioner. So you have to grind the tensioner to fit it too.
Aren't these cars fun?
Anyway, as the more eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted, the inlet cam timing got advanced a bit too, to bring a bit more midrange torque to the table.
After reassembling it all, the engine was night and day different, nice, clean response to a stab of the throttle, maybe a little on the slow side but very linear now, and pulled harder up top to the redline, it really felt like it didn't like being strung out much past 6k before that.
Unfortunately, everything really stopped there, the same day my grandad had a heart attack and my mother had a stroke while we were waiting for the ambulance with him, my grandad took a while to recover and I spent I think 10 days by my mothers side without sleeping because I had to watch her for choking on fluid in her lungs constantly, she never woke up and the car just got left for probably half a year while I sorted things out, didn't really have any enthusiasm for it, and I ended up with nerve damage in my left shoulder that meant I lost my grip randomly in my left hand for a year or more which really compounded things. Whilst I did some bits and pieces, speaker upgrades, seat repairs, general servicing and few other bits and pieces and repairs, I didn't document anything really, wasn't in the mindset for anything bar the odd distraction for a long time, as you can guess.
Oh, and the bin collection lorry drove into the back arch of the Coupe and all but wrote it off because it wasn't worth repairing at values at the time, just to seal the deal, I think I got a payout of 600-700 quid or something, even after arguing it for being a rare car with documented work. I just took a payout from 'em and pushed it out myself.
Anyway, I kept trawling amazon for things at night when I wasn't sleeping and dropped on some serious bargains, and slowly built up this lot for about 200 quid I think. which finally motivated me to get back under the car and do something, so it got new front springs, new top mounts front and rear, top mount bearings, new droplinks front and rear, KYB front dampers and Bilstien rears, new front balljoints, and new front arb bushes too:
That was pretty much most of the wearing bushes and parts on the suspension side refreshed by then.
While I was under there I noticed some of the air con hose and water hose bushes were very tired too, to the point one kept falling out its bracket - and well, hammer and nail, remember?
Out came the printed parts again:
Edited by PhillipM on Monday 19th February 00:38
Okay, next bit of fun, well, I now had all new suspension on the front, albeit I wasn't perfectly happy with the front end, the bushes available for these tend to be a bit cheap and cheerful now the cars old, and even with new bushes I could feel the wishbones tweak the front around on rough farm tracks at speed.
However, I now had the two old front wishbones to hand....you know where this is going
I measured up carefully from the old wishbones, and drew up some polybushes to print... only with a difference, instead of the usual thing with polybushes where they have a cheap sleeve turned from some bar in the centre to rotate on (or in some cases just use the rough af cast pin on the wishbone) mine got designed to use proper ground 52100 bearing races in the centre, that press onto the wishbone pin and act as the bearing surface - and riding on that surface, instead of the soft, grippy polyurethane that leads to stick/slip and friction issues, is a nice hard acetal wear surface that's actually designed to be used as a bearing, complete with detents to hold lubrication and that's then encapsulated by the actual polybush around the outside to support it and take care off all the deflections and NVH duties:
It also has a grease pocked in the centre that feeds into the acetal bearing surface, and as you can see, there are sealing lips printed into the bush itself to keep water and dirt out:
Gave them a tap into the old housing with my very sophisticated manual press:
Vs the old rubber ones:
So now I had some nice firm polybushes for the rear of the wishbones (which is where most of the movement was/is on the standard setup), but ones that don't have the friction and squeaking issues that usual polybushes exhibit.
I fitted a set of good Lemforder rubber bushes to the front of them, which fortunately you can still get, and swapped the wishbones back around again
That tightened up the front end a lot, much less tramlining or wandering, less torque steer and really barely any change in NVH, it was maybe a bit noisier for the secondary ride on very rough roads.
However, I now had the two old front wishbones to hand....you know where this is going
I measured up carefully from the old wishbones, and drew up some polybushes to print... only with a difference, instead of the usual thing with polybushes where they have a cheap sleeve turned from some bar in the centre to rotate on (or in some cases just use the rough af cast pin on the wishbone) mine got designed to use proper ground 52100 bearing races in the centre, that press onto the wishbone pin and act as the bearing surface - and riding on that surface, instead of the soft, grippy polyurethane that leads to stick/slip and friction issues, is a nice hard acetal wear surface that's actually designed to be used as a bearing, complete with detents to hold lubrication and that's then encapsulated by the actual polybush around the outside to support it and take care off all the deflections and NVH duties:
It also has a grease pocked in the centre that feeds into the acetal bearing surface, and as you can see, there are sealing lips printed into the bush itself to keep water and dirt out:
Gave them a tap into the old housing with my very sophisticated manual press:
Vs the old rubber ones:
So now I had some nice firm polybushes for the rear of the wishbones (which is where most of the movement was/is on the standard setup), but ones that don't have the friction and squeaking issues that usual polybushes exhibit.
I fitted a set of good Lemforder rubber bushes to the front of them, which fortunately you can still get, and swapped the wishbones back around again
That tightened up the front end a lot, much less tramlining or wandering, less torque steer and really barely any change in NVH, it was maybe a bit noisier for the secondary ride on very rough roads.
Edited by PhillipM on Wednesday 28th February 00:10
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