Category Archives: Sizaire Naudin

Spring Cleaning

Posted on by

Everyone should invite a car club to their garage at least once a year for a Garage Crawl, apart from the obvious opportunity to show off the real reason is that you at last will see a reason to clean up the junk you’ve been tripping over for the last year and maybe some serious rearranging that never seemed to happen otherwise. As I never got around to painting the floor I will abstain from eating off it but it’s not bad all the same, tomorrow they arrive.
As this is the first entry for some time you would be right thinking that I have been slacking off, the Bugatti is now running well, the Douglas survived a 3 day rally without mishap but the Sizaire is still waiting for some attention. So instead of methodically working through this problem I have removed the cylinder and am currently trying to remove the inlet valve cage so the hopefully burnt exhaust valve will be exposed. I really have no evidence to support this theory it’s just the way my brain seems to be working at the moment so have decided to enjoy the challenge of disassembling something that has not yet been pulled apart.
Here is a picture of how not to remove the valve cage with a slide hammer. Currently cylinder is resting on bench waiting for another random attack from yours truly.

Bug comes home

Posted on by

The good news is that I have at last sold the little red Citroen 5CV, the bad news is that I have replaced it with a little blue car that goes much faster from the same country, more on that later.

Earlier I reported that the Sizaire was all ready to go, however that has not proved to be the case as she steadfastly refuses to leave the property. On reflection there was some missing and hard starting getting close to Sydney so maybe she has a burnt exhaust valve or the spare maggy has followed it’s partner in forgetting to spark regularly. Andrew has lent me his mag so must get to that once the Blue car gets a little less demanding.

The Darracq radiator is out for a re-core so hopefully will be back in time for the run to South Australia in October but then again I could use the Blue car for that.

Lastly the SM is still crunching going into 3rd and 5th especially not good when I am trying to sell it. The weird thing is that before the engine rebuild there was no crunching, so what has changed? All I can think of is oil or clutch, I tried a synthetic oil however if anything that made it worse, I have now some straight 90 weight oil to try so fingers crossed if that does not work it’s transmission out time. No wonder my tastes have changed to Vintage/Veteran motoring.

She runs

Posted on by

After 52 Hours at a correctional facility the Sizaire crank has decided to go straight or I certainly hope so and after a week of doing penance planting trees, spraying weeds and other domestic deeds I have earned my pass to the shed.

The reassembly was straight forward the install was done as a unit by pulling it up through the bottom and all the lines connected with no problems. Now it has to be remembered that the car was running when I pulled it down so I was somewhat surprised when she kicked back on startup and would not run.

It seems that for the whole trip from Perth to Sydney the valve timing was one tooth out so I retimed the starting timer and the magneto so all should be good now. Well nearly, everytime I tried to crank it the starting dog slipped at compression, easily fixed by reforming the teeth with the angle grinder but what was the chance that she lasted exactly until the end of the trip but no more.

One pull on the crank and she started and at exactly the same time it started pouring with rain so a quick wet trip around the shed seems to confirm that she runs, will have to leave it until tomorrow for a proper test.