1975 Peugeot 304 S Cabriolet with hard and soft tops.

Superb, looks a great project and the hard top has got to be a rarity?

A friend who collects Peugeots has one in his collection and loves it. I think it's the most used of all his toys.

Looking forward to hearing more.


PS. re the image sizing, when you embed the images if you jump back and forth between the 'Preview' and 'BBCode' tabs it should trigger the sizing element to appear on the end of the image code - it should look like the below:

"style="max-width:100%;"

just simply change the 100% bit to something smaller - I use 70% as that seems to fit for most of my images.

I think the sizing is being looked into so it may be this is sorted in time but that's the manual way to amend things.

super super super old thing! don't recall ever having seen one with a hard top before. really looking forward to this one.

Think I need a new laptop as this is torture. Anyway a few pics. Debris found between the outer and centre sill. Not sure how much was corrosion and how much was rodent nesting.



A considerable amount of debris.


Centre sill was rotten and replaced before the outer was repaired.


New outer sill made by a local fabrication business as was too long and thick for me to manage. Welded it om myself ok.


Outer sill welding doesn't have to be particularly pretty as it is covered by a screw on decorative sill which fortunately was quite new.


The same process was carried out on the other side to outer and centre sills. Will try to cover the floor and inner sill next time and keep posting until we get up to date with progress so far.

Jumping the gun big time. Will save the details for when the pictures are posted but to give you a clue!   If you look at the third picture you can see I have folded the outer sill down before removing it completely but it is double skinned in places where new metal had been added on top of old rotten metal. There is a gap in the middle where the original sill had rotted. Thinking about it now maybe that is some of the debris I found when I opened it up.

Well worth the love you are giving it, a lovely old thing.

Ok then the floor such as it was.

Not looking too bad if you had glanced at it with "I want to buy eyes and carpets fitted" but in reality terrible.


Nearside inner sill coming away from the floor


Section of the floor pulled up and surprise surprise more metal underneath it as well. You can see the reinforcing plate for the seat belt mounting which should be under the floor is actually sandwiched between the original floor remains and newer metal.


From underneath you can see the new metal which had been welded over the original rotten floor. It was the same on both sides and the full length of the car.


Quite a bit removed and a small section of new inner sill starting to be welded in.


It was probably around this time the neighbours thought I was losing the plot. One asked me "how do you know what you are doing" and all I could say was I don't.


Nearside done but will probably clean off and start again with the seam sealer.


Off side done and same again for the seam sealer. The cheap swaging tool from Ebay came in handy.


And finally from the underside. Looking better. New seat belt mounting plate visible on the nearside but offside still to fit


If I could start all over again and apart from not buying the bloody thing I could do a better job now. I have learned so much and gained a lot of experience already but hey ho. I am not a body man but will get there. I found that section quite difficult as the floor welded onto the inner sill and carried on to where the flange on the floor, the centre and outer sill all met up and 3 thicknesses of metal were welded together. So all the bits I made had to be quite accurate.

Yes. Turned out o be a bit of a heap. Has taken several years to get to this point due to working outside, lack of interest, noise consideration for my neighbours etc. Pictures are almost up to date then it will be as work progresses.  
On the plus side I retire on April 30th, nearer to 67 than 66 and had enough. Will have more time from then on weather permitting but wish I could get it under cover.

The figures I have seen from an enthusiast who has a small website for these cars is that there are between 130 and 150 surviving examples in the UK and of those about 80 on the road. Apparently the tax and mot exempt status of vehicles over 40 years old make it difficult to establish precise numbers.

Parts available in the UK are few and far between but for obvious reasons there is an active scene in France with some parts being remanufactured and a good supply of used panels and mechanical parts.  The French equivalent of Ebay is Leboncoin and you can find most things there given time but Brexit has made it expensive for carriage with many sellers unwilling to post to the UK.

As of 5pm tonight I am officially retired so hopefully some progress will be made in the coming weeks.