This story had paused at the beginning of May after my previous repairs on my little Renault Clio (diesel ☠️) from 1991 proved to be insufficient, I told my misadventures in this article at the beginning of May and even before in this other article in March

After redoing the entire cylinder head, changing the valve stem seals, the crankshaft oil seal... my car was burning more and more oil with each kilometer, you could see it, you could feel it and it was starting to cost a lot. Especially since on top of that, during a trip, the oil filler cap had decided to break and spill it everywhere. The horror…

Impossible to continue driving in these conditions, so I put the car away in early May, hoping to have the time and resources to take care of it quickly. The thing to do was at best to change the piston rings, at worst to change the engine if it was too damaged, or even change the car.

This is something I had never done and it took longer than expected, the first step being to know how to do it.

Take out the engine completely as recommended? It takes space and equipment (a workshop crane) and it requires a lot more disassembly . I didn't really want to, knowing that the value of the engine, and of the car in general, is very low and so was my budget.

After some research and requests for advice, I decided to try a "simple" change of the segments, without completely removing the engine block. It's less dismantling but it's still a bet because if it turns out that it's the cylinder block that is damaged, everything would have to be dismantled anyway...

After several months of waiting, I started to really work on it at the end of September and the beginning of October, with in order:

• Disassembly the oil sump
• Disassembly the connecting rod bearings
• Disassembly of the fully equipped cylinder head (which I had already redone in the previous step)
• Engine block cylinder exit from above
• Cylinder cleaning
• Control of pistons, cylinders, clearance and ring cut…
• Cleaning, cleaning
• Disassembly and checking the oil pump
• Cylinder de-icing (honing)
• Implementation of new segments
• Refit the cylinders by changing the connecting rod bearings
• Change the cylinder head gasket
• Replace the cylinder head and tighten it after thoroughly cleaning the gasket surfaces
• Bolt tightening
• Refit the oil pump, the oil pan
• Refit all the other elements that had to be removed, the timing belt, the accessory belt, the fuel hoses, water hoses, air hoses, battery, fan motor...
• Check all
• Recheck
• Getting your hands dirty and breaking your fingernails multiple times
• Add oil and coolant...

It is a lot of work! If I had to pay a professional for all this, it would have far exceeded the value of the car. There, the cost of the necessary parts  is still afordable, and the specific tools for occasional use, can also be found at a low cost on the Internet. It is profitable on the only condition that it works in the end, of course.

The restart was a bit laborious, mainly because the battery had discharged during the long months of immobilization – but after that it was back to normal.

After having driven a few hundred kilometres, I can make an initial assessment, always cautious. The engine runs very well, the car no longer smokes and no longer consumes a gargantuan amount of oil. So I'm quite happy, my efforts seem to have been successful!

So here we go again, a priori, for new adventures! 🙆‍♀️

Provided you can put diesel in... but this little car has the big advantage of being able to consume only 62 mpg if you pay a little attention to its driving and for a 31-year-old car, that's not bad at all.

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