RetroPug's Ph.1 Diablo Gti-6

[RetroPug]

I've been freshening things up in the engine bay. Eventually my plan is to have everything on the entire car refreshed and looking as new, but that will have to wait until I have somewhere indoors to store and work on the car. It's still miles away from where I want it but at least it looks alright for now.

My heatshield was in remarkably good condition given the state of some of the ones I've seen on other 306s and given that mine is a relatively old 306:



Nevertheless, it still needed to be more shiny, like this:



I've also been painting a spare set of cam covers, along with various engine compartment brackets. I fitted all of these today along with the now gold heatshield.




Finally, my exhaust has a sleeved fitting between the catalyst and the centre-section. Remebering my previous update, I said I'd snapped the outlet pipe of my catalyst on a sprint day, this had actually already been repaired once by an exhaust shop, plus this also happened on an old 306 of mine.

So, I got a spare catalyst so that I could modify this in order to simply exchange it for the broken one on the car at work where I have access to a ramp, which looked like this (picture from for sale advert):



Not only do I need a sleeve fitment, but I needed to prevent this cat from snapping in the same place as all the others. This was the solution I made:



Theoretically the flexi should have some give in it which should reduce the stresses in the rest of the catalyst assembly. The seam to the left of the flexi was a weld which was already on the flexi when I bought it. All that remains is to fit the new cat, and cut the centre section a bit shorter to match it and then I am ready for Pugfest.