Simca 1301
Sam finds out why his Simca was laid-up in the Eighties
When an apparently perfectly good car is taken off the road and locked in a barn or garage, there’s usually a perfectly good reason behind it. Sometimes, there’s an obvious smoking gun: a con-rod protruding from the crankcase, for instance, or embarrassing accident damage. Other times, it’s harder to find. Sneakiest and most annoying are the maladies that only come to light after recommissioning work: the knocking of a little end that’s starting to consider making a bid for freedom or a gnashing of teeth from the final drive. When reviving a laid-up car, therefore, it’s nice to establish why it was put on the naughty step as early in proceedings as possible.
My Simca 1301 was a fine example. I bought it while on a Trabant-touching holiday in the Netherlands, enthused by its faded Sputnik-like silver paintwork, outrageous magenta interior, wonderfully unadulterated condition and, of course, Heineken. It had no paperwork and the seller knew nothing of its history, other than that it’d come from somewhere in France and it’d been in dry storage since the mid-eighties. I trailered it home for intrusive forensic examination.
I fancied it had been proudly owned from new by an elderly gentleman somewhere southern. Everything I inspected was little-worn and original, with no evidence of any interference beyond basic maintenance. Almost every fastener I undid gave the impression that it was moving for the first time since 1967. There was no significant rust, its 58,276km seemed totally plausible and it’d clearly been in a fine state of general repair when retired from service.
Nothing was obviously badly wrong with it. There were no foreign bodies or sinister metallic particles in the engine, gearbox or final drive oil. The cooling system, however, was in a state of dereliction. A squirrel had been using the top of the radiator and the thermostat housing to store its acorns. The water pump felt like its was filled with stalagmites and extracting the block’s drain plug produced a stream of orange sherbet.
Off with its head
I removed the cylinderhead to probe deeper and instantly found the smoking gun I’d been seeking. The head gasket had been fitted squiffily and was excessively squished around cylinder four.
Coolant had been finding its way from the water jacket into the cylinder. The damage it’d caused was weird. The car had clearly soldiered on with the leaking gasket for a very long time, as corrosion had pockmarked the piston crown and eaten a large chunk out of the combustion chamber. It had just burrowed deep enough to break through beneath the exhaust valve seat – the resulting loss of compression presumably being what finally instigated the car’s retirement.
How this had been achieved is mysterious. Perhaps the owner unknowingly controlled the symptoms of the leaking head gasket by never driving more than 5km or exceeding 1500rpm? The engine certainly sported an impressive carbon build-up for its mileage, suggesting that it had rarely been run up to temperature or treated to healthy flagellation. Or perhaps a strange coolant had been used, which left something acidic, corrosive and unpleasant when its water evaporated during combustion?
Retail therapy
Removing and dismembering the short block revealed the affected piston and bore to be good enough to go again and the rest of the engine to be lightly worn. Its shopping list simply includes a gasket set, a water pump, a timing chain, a pair of crankshaft oil seals… and a cylinderhead. Elsewhere, it needs more-or-less everything that one would expect of a car that’s been festering, plus a few bonus items: a set of brake and clutch hydraulics, pads and shoes, a clutch driven plate, numerous bushes and boots, fuel pipes and hoses, carburettor and fuel pump rebuild kits, a rubber propshaft coupling and centre bearing, various coolant hoses, engine mounts, axle oil seals, shock absorbers, trackrod ends, balljoints and a Christmas hamper of service items. An online splurge saw a range of bits winging my way from ebay.fr and ebay.co.uk – and several members of the massively helpful Simca Club UK are on the case with the rest.
While waiting, I removed the fuel tank, which predictably was filled with crusty pestilence. I generally clean tanks by combining water, a few handfuls of gravel and the nastiest domestic cleaning product I have to hand – in this case, caustic soda-based drain cleaner – then gyrating it regularly and vigorously until I lose enthusiasm. Annoyingly, though, the tank’s convoluted design made the gravel near-impossible to extract. I suceeded by rinsing it out repeatedly, drying it for a week in a warm office and using a vacuum cleaner to extract the balance. I know everyone ‘knows someone’ who has ‘turned a vacuum cleaner into a jet engine’ by hoovering up petrol vapour, but attempts to do this recreationally have led me to conclude that it’s quite tricky to achieve. Sure enough, Henry survived.
I still wouldn’t recommend trying it, however.
sam.glover@practicalclassics.co.uk