On the Peugeot 401, we have been attending to some of the final steps, whilst we are waiting for pistons from the machine shop.
In preparation for fitting, all water jacket plates have been thoroughly cleaned up, ready for paint and repair if required. Shown here is one of the end plates, that also acts as a hinge point for a linkage, so not an easily replaceable part. As you can see it has had some serious corrosion over the years, resulting in pitting and breaking through in places! We have cleaned it up with a wire brush and repaired with a filling of braze in the worst of the pitting and holes, it was then cleaned up and dressed true and treated with rust killing solution. We arranged two parallel steel sections in the press to gently straighten out some of the distortion from previous repairs aswell as slight heat distortion from our braze repair.
