After a year of driving Acad without any drastic maintenance or repairs, spring is the time for due diligence on the maintenance. During this small project, Acad will get new engine oil and a new oil filter, we’ll adjust the valve clearance and grease the chassis. While I’m at it, I’ll have a go at replacing the gators on the right side drive axle.
For this project, we need some parts, a bunch of tools, and some time. Let’s get started!
A 2CV oil change
Draining any 2CV oil is easy peasy, just get under the car with a 22mm wrench, an oil pan, and some rags. As our fav cars are quite low, you can drive it up on some planks to get it slightly off the ground. That said, never jack up the car and work under it, always use solid stands. As you’ve guessed, I have a couple of 15x15cm logs that I can drive the car on.
Once you’re under the car, position the oil pan under the drain plug and remove the plug with the wrench. Then wait for the oil to stop dripping, mount a new gasket on the plug and screw it back in place. Do not over-torque the plug! Wipe off any remaining oil and we’re done here.
The oilfilter on my Acad, and any 2CV fitted with one, can be found on the right side of the engine, just slightly behind the cylinder. You may find it accessible as it is, but I needed the front wings off anyway, and that’ll give you lots of room to work with.
Leftly loosey does the job to get the filter off.
In theory, the filter should come off by handcraft only. In practice, this varies. I’ve got four different filter tools, only one of which will work on my Acad. This tool can only be used to unscrew the filter, so putting the new filter back on is handcraft only – as it should be. But, before unscrewing the old filter, you can put a low plastic tray on the chassis under the filter as some oil will leak out and make a mess of your chassis and engine bay. Make sure the rubber gasket comes off with the filter. If not, remove it from the engine by hand.
Putting the filter back is quite easy, but do not forget to slightly oil the rubber gasket that seals against the engine. As said before, screw back by hand, not too tight, but not too loose either – just lagom as we say in Sweden.
Obviously, the old oil and the old filter need to be disposed of in a responsible manner, which implies not by burning it or by dumping it somewhere.
With the old oil out, and the filter replaced, it’s time to fill her up again. According to almighty Haynes, the engine can take between 2 and 2.5 liters of oil, and another 0.3 liters if the rocker covers were taken of. I did indeed take off these covers but decided to initially fill with 2 liters, then run the engine shortly to fill the oil filter. After that I followed the dipstick to top off the rest of the oil to the max indicator.
Surprisingly, no other tools than a 22mm wrench and an oilfilter tool were needed for this job. Obvioulsy, if you decided to remove the wings, a couple of extra wrenches ranging from 10.. to 13mm would come in handy on an Acad. If my memory serves me right, a regular 2CV only requires the car’s original lugnut wrench to remove the wings. Apart from that, you need an oil pan and the recommended plastic tray.
Valve clearance adjustment
The next job is adjusting the valve clearance. Strickly spoken I could wait another year to do that as Acad does not drive all that much, but why not do it now? Within 2CV circles, you can hear lengthy discussions on what clearance values to use. Haynes again quotes 0.15mm to 0.20mm. Me, I stuck to 0.20mm. It’s easy, and I’d rather hear a valve slightly ticking than burning one!
On your 2CV, you definitely want to take the wings off. On the more advance bodywork of an Acad, dents in the inner wings were designed to allow removing the rocker covers with the wings still on. Me, I took the wings off as this provides me with lots of extra space to actually see what I’m doing. I’d always advise to do the same.
With the wings off, the rocker covers can be removed with an 11mm wrench to take off the central nut holding the cover. The small low tray used previously under the oil filter can now be repurposed to catch the oil dripping from the rocker cover.
With the covers off, it’s time to start the valve clearance procedure. The engine needs to be turned to top dead center, aka TDC. This is easiest done by removing the spark plugs as this will allow the engine to be turned over much easier. In the Haynes book you can read there’s a marking on the flywheel you can use, but I usually eyeball it. If you shine a light into the sparkplug hole, you can see the piston coming up to TDC. Just turn back and forth until you got it right. At TDC, one cylinder is about to ignite, while the other is closing the outlet valve and opening the inlet valve. This opening and closing can easily be spotted by jiggling the crank back and forward ever so slightly. With the valves on one cylinder tumbling between outlet and inlet valves, it is the other side we need to address.
In simple terms, adjusting the clearance implies that a thicket feeler gauge does not fit, while a thinner gauge fits loosely. The required gauge, 0.20mm in my case, should just slide between the valve stem and the rocker.
If you loosen the 10mm nut and tighten it again, you may notice the adjustment screw wanting to turn with the nut. We do not want this to happen, so we place a flat head screwdriver in the slot on the screw and hold it in place while we loosen the nut a small bit. Then turn the screwdriver to get your preferred clearance value. Then tighten the nut. More often than not, the clearance will change when the nut is tightened. So just loosen and adjust again until you get it right after the nut has been tightened. As with the oil drain plug, you want to fasten the nut but not too hard and not too loose. Remember lagom?
Once both valves are adjusted, the other side is due. Just turn the crankshaft 360 degrees, check for tumbling rockers, and move your tools to the other side. Repeat the procedure and the adjustment is done. All that remains is mounting the rocker covers and sparkplugs (and their HT leads) and putting the wings back on the car.
Now, I didn’t do that as I still had a faulty gator to attend to.
Sparkplugs:
A used sparkplug tells a tale. Mine looked like this:
and I was quite happy with that. Also, there’s no need for new plugs, so the old ones went back in again.
Driveshaft gator replacement
Out driveshafts consist of two CVT joints and an expandable axle. The CVT joints each have a gator that keeps the great in and the dirt out. For the same reason, the expandable middle part of the axle also has a gator. On my Acad, the inside looked quite new, while the outside could be better. The middle part was ripped and needed replacing. While I was at it, I also replaced the outer gator.
Notably, older 2CV models can be equipped with knuckles or universal joints (UJ) while newer models sport CVT’s. Notably, a UJ doesn’t have a gator. Mine has CVT’s so the rest of this story only applies to these newer models.
Lucky for us, we still had the wings off, at least I did, so we have great access! Another great advantage is that you do this job from above, opposite to most cars where this job must be done from under the car.
My Acad has front disk brakes with the rotors mounted against the gearbox. The bolts holding the rotors also attach the driveshaft to the gearbox. There’s four bolts and two nuts holding the rotor and driveshaft, all have to be removed. As said before, access is great and it takes no time to loosen the nut and bolts. After that, you can wiggle the inner CVT free from the brake rotor and gearbox.
If you feel like it, you could remove the big nut holding the CVT at the wheel side. However, you can replace all gators by just loosening the inside of the driveshaft. There’s just enough space to split the inner part of theshaft from the outer part. Then you can remove all gators you’d like to replace, and mounting the new ones before joining the inner and outer axle stumps again.
As said earlier, I was gonna replace the outer and middle gators and leave the inner gator in place. If you check the outer axle stump, you may notice that the diameter of the small end of the gators is much smaller that the diameter of the splines. WHilst this may seem impossible to do, a dosis of grease and some careful stretching make it possible to get both gators in place. If it is a cold day, you can soften the rubber by keeping it under a hot watertap for a while. As I was doing the job in the summer, this was not needed. Before putting on the outer gator, about half of the grease supplied with the gators was put into the outer gator. Note that this is hypoid grease, så no regular grease should be used instead.
After putting on the gators, they’ll have to be sealed. My kit came with stainless bands that I decided to ignore in favor a couple of of zip-ties. I reckon you’ll need some tool to get the stainless bands correctly installed and I do not have that tool, nor was I about to to invent a method to use them. The old gators had been installed with regular hose fasteners, which seemed to have worked nicely.
With the gators on, it’s time to wrap it up. Put back the bolts and nuts for the inner stump and the brake rotor, Then grease the axle and the kingpin while access is still great. After that, the wings can go back on and the car should be ready for the mandatory test drive.
As an image says more than a 1000 words:
Outer gator ready:
All’s ready and back in place:
…doesn’t that look swell!
#2cv #acad #acadiane #diy