Preparing the donor engine for the 2CV engine swap
1988 CITROEN 2CV
I loved the 2CV6 Special I had just after leaving university and drove it as a daily for three years until it started to rust away and I wanted something faster. Many years later I'm lucky enough to be able to treat myself to another one and happily drive around in it for a year or so...
...before deciding that it would be fun to put a bigger engine in it. This was a path that others have trodden before me so I could get some parts from Sparrow Automotive and I figured that I could fabricate the rest of them. This is the story of that build. The first job was to buy a donor engine end to make life a lot easier I bought the whole bike so that I had all of the loom and hopefully everything else I needed. The gearbox on this bike was broken so I got this 1100RT for £500...
The engine is an 1100 horizontally opposed twin cylinder that's roughly the same shape and dimensions as the original 2CV6 engine. The original engine is 602cc and made 29bhp and the bmw engine is nearly twice the capacity and, with a bit of fettling, makes nearly four times the power. The first job is to strip the bike down and keep everything I'll need and then find a good home for the rest.
Once the engine is out of the bike we can pull the gearbox and put it to one side as we won't be using it. We'll be using an adapter plate and using the 2CV gearbox. This shows the bmw flywheel and clutch in the engine on the bench...
We now remove the clutch and flywheel and fit the adapter plate supplied by Sparrow Automotive...
Finally we can fit the modified 2cv flywheel and the new Valeo 2CV clutch...
We need to slightly modify the gearbox (more later) but we can do a dry run fitting of the 2CV gearbox to the BMW engine...
...more coming next time.