1990 Peugeot 309 1.6 - finally back on track

Nice car, i've allways liked the 309. You don't see many 1.6 ones here though, infact i think i've only seen one before.

Hallo Siert, I am jealous of you doing motorsport....

Look forward to the rest of the progress.

Thanks, that video is mint, look on the Porsche driver face would be priceless to see an old Saab 900 on his tail, good cars, had mine a few years now.

Well the "new" engine and gearbox are in and for now they work well! ;D

So now I have an all-alloy 1.6 GTi engine that for the moment is running on the carburettor I took of my old engine.

It was all together pretty straightforward. All the unexpected surprises had to do with the gearbox which had different control- and clutch levers on so they had to be swapped over from the old box. The pin holding the old clutch lever and fork in place was stuck, and as it was difficult to work on as long as it was still fitted to the old box we decided to remove it as one piece and then take the pin out on a press or vice.

So my friend took the honour of carefully removing it from the old cast iron box with that special tool he carries on his shoulder

Which did the trick ;-)


The biggest gearbox related surpise came when I finally had the engine running though. I sat in the car, pushed the gearlever to left-forward, released the clutch and... went backwards

As I knew that Peugeot made so called BE1 and BE3 gearboxes which share the same casing, but not the same pattern I did realize immediately what had happened... It by the way has nothing to do with the different levers and clutch forks as it seems both types of levers were used on both types of boxes.

It's a bit problematic as my gearlever doesn't have the release mechanism to engage reverse which I now find is really VERY convenient when reverse is left of first. It's kind of hard to find first now, and changing back from third to second also required some practice as the gearlever can go further left as second gear is... So I've got to get that sorted.

After that: Fuel injection

Nice little project. Reminds me of my old 309 SRi (1.6i engine from 205 GTi) from a long time ago and I miss that car very much. Never seen another for sale - if it was I'd have it!

Well, yesterday was a day of sudden mojo changes.

To cut a long story short: Carburettor failed last week before Christmas, so the already planned injection system had to be installed. It's an LE-jetronic so not very complicated. I'm doing all the wiring from scratch using cheap unprotected connectors (which I will seal later) in places where I think they're convenient.

I had a big wiring mess finished just before my Christmas holidays. I was pretty convinced that it wasn't going to work straight away, and that it would have many random problems once it did. Also, I had all of the holidays to make the problems worse in my mind. Putting the car back into the workshop on Thursday the first thing I had to do was mount a fuel pump. Looking under the car I found some rust that I didn't know about, and also the rust I did know about has taken the shape of holes now, so I wasn't happy...

Nothing really shocking, but it seemed like I'd be better of taking the car out of traffic to do the job properly and buying a reliable working car for winter use (which is not very sensible at all, as I can do without a car so having only hobby cars is fine). So I went out to buy a very Skoda Felicia Combi yesterday but we got a phonecall while on or way that somebody had showed up at the sellers house and given the guy the asking price. I went back to browsing car ads and even opened a topic here on Rover 600s...

Here's the not to serious rust, actually the worst rust is around the front windscreen which is so loose in the rubber you can move it around by hand (and obviously leaks a lot).





Well finally at somepoint in the afternoon I managed to convince myself to finish a temporary fuel setup. So, I hung the old BX pump under the car using tie wraps. Then I connected it to the inlet manifold with old fuel pipe from the BX and old hydraulics hoses of the GS. The pump's wires conveniently went through the rust hole in the floor as you can see on the previous picture.

The setup looked like this when I first turned the key:


And surprisingly enough, it fired... well, at least it sounded like it was going to. After closing some holes that were keeping air from flowing through the air flow meter it ran ;D ;D ;D Result, and big mojo boost!

So I connected all the vacuum hoses and tried again, and it started immediately and started to idle nicely ;D Somewere late at night I decided it was all to nice not to test drive. As you can see I don't yet have space for the air flow meter, so I took the bonnet off and tie wrapped everything together, leading to this setup:




These pictures were taking after the 2 minute test drive which took place at midnight on slippery roads, and it seemed to perform brilliantly!!!! If you look closely you may see some steam on the picture as I accidently mounted the cap on the thermostat housing badly so once the system came on pressure it threw some coolant out.

But it works ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Some black tape has changed the appearance of the engine bay



Even though Peugeot fitted this 1.6 multipoint injection engine to 309's themselves I have some fabrication to do to get it all to work. The reason is that I took all the parts of a Citroën BX, and there are differences.

309 injection models have their fuel pump in the tank, on the BX the fuel pump is outside the tank. I'll use the BX pump as I don't have a 309 injection tank (I had one scrapped couple of months back )

As high pressure fuel pumps aren't great at pumping fuel trough empty lines I wanted it to sit about level with the bottom of the fuel tank so that the fuel will flow to the pump easily. On the BX it also sits at that height approximately, but it's mounted behind the rear axle. As the 309 axle takes much more space the floor is way to high behind the tank. Also, it would be very hard to route a pipe from behind the tank to the engine as the tank is sqeezed in between the sills.

So, I wanted the pump in front of the tank, but of there's no space there either. As I had to fix some small rust holes in the floor anyway, I though I made as well change the design a bit


(By the amount of seam sealer and the lack of a picture without it you can guess how bad my welding is)

The pump now hangs in its original mounting rubber of the BX, and the fuel filter will go in the other hole.


I've also made a setup for the air filter, but I'll have to change that again as it's ridulous. The air filter became the lowest part of the car as well as the mudguard for all the dirt coming off the left front wheel...

I find that it is really hard to fabricate things. Trying to do these really simple things and getting messy results has made the respect I have for the great fabricators on this forum even bigger. Fixing cars is easy. Fabricating is hard.

But it'll work! ;D

I've been doing a lot of work to this in the last couple of weeks. After welding all the small rust holes I found earlier shut I thought I was done with it.

I ordered orange brake lines from www.brake-lines.co.uk/ the same place where Matt Jones ordered his pink ones. One of the lines in the set of 4 they send me had the wrong connectors on it, but I e-mailed them and they send me a new one for free.

When I wanted to install the brake lines to the rear I decided to drop the rear axle to get better acccess after which I was just pulling and pushing a bit around some "surface rust". This of course resulted in a hole in one the bars the axle attaches to...

So I went from...


To opening the floor to reveal the original rust hole, in the metal bar at the point where the spare wheel carrier attached to it.


After which I cut away half of the bar, and opened up the floor also on the other half of the bar to inspect it.


Folded a new half-a-bar from sheet metal and welded it in.


The worse your access to something is the harder this welding thing becomes


And after closing the floor it looked like this


I'm still learning to weld but I must say I'm pretty pleased with myself for getting this done!



By the Finnish law the easiest way to get the engine swap approved is by showing that Peugeot themselves also build a 309 with these specifications. On Tuesday a Peugeot Dealer got me the name of the right person to call at the Finnish Peugeot importer. I called the guy and he understood exactly what I was talking about and made me a certificate and posted it the same day!

Tomorrow I'll take my car for the "modification" inspection, as well as the normal yearly inspection. I have to pass it to make my deadline. As on Sunday the first autoslalom event of the season takes place; The extremely useful practice day.

This passed the inspection today! Both the lowering and the engine swap are now mentioned on the license papers.