The original engines had this oil feed visible above the camshaft bore at the very front of the crankcase, which is shown below. As the camshaft rotates this drilling is filled two times per camshaft revolution, and after this it passes in a trough that is underneath the bearing and the oil jumps into the slingers. Some oil splashes back and passes through the main bearing, but the rest is accelerated by the slingers at the crank web, and passes through the big end bearing via a drilling in the crank web before exiting and splash lubricating the little end.



Unfortunately this hole is too small, and it is the cause of a 50% reduction in flow rate over the rear pro rata. There is an added complication that this hole is also 50% smaller than the rear oil feed, so there is quite a bit of reduction in potential flow rate assuming the pressures were the same. As you might have read there is a pressure difference, because of the secondary drilling that fed the camshaft timing gear on the early engines which compounded the problem , and led to reliability issues, which eventually forced an engine redesign to this area.

This can be negated by carrying out a few modifications, all of which will be documented here.



It might not be obviously apparent from this picture, but the hole size is now 6mm diameter, whereas the one above is just 4mm. This new oil feed now matches the camshaft aperture, so all openings, front and rear are timed equally. The 4mm diameter hole in the middle that is drilled presently, will have to be enlarged to 5mm to match the rear oil feed that is fed from the common camshaft oil gallery. At first it is more important to get the hole in the right position, and work from this, which is why it is now at 5mm diameter, as shown below.



This now means both front and rear oil galleries are equally phased and have the same pressure variations, as there is no mismatched timing gear oil feed anymore affecting the front oil supply. However that still leaves the task of creating a new oil feed to do this, because you didn’t think the gear was going to lubricate itself from the plain bearing leaking, but that’ll be another update.

A little mod that improves oil quality, reduces heat build up in the oil, and improves pumping losses to the engine. At the moment the Panhard timing case oil level is determined by the hi level drainage points shown here or leaking past the front main bearing.



Normal practice for a splash lubricated gear is to have no more than a third of the overall gear diameter immersed, so why Panhard did this surprises me. Originally they had a fibre wheel of massive proportions meshing to a hardened steel gear, with huge gear area, and in all fairness it probably didn’t need much lubrication. If it was being made today this fibre wheel, which is often replaced by an aluminium one, could be made of a plastic material quite easily.



These new drillings, now restore the status quo, and at the same time allow for this area to get some oil changes. Technically these wouldn’t get fully drained, unless you remove the steel timing cover case, because there is no low level return point. I think it is realistic to revise this mod and lower the oil level further, but as this is the third engine I have modded, I will wait until I get some better feedback before doing so.

I have mentioned earlier that the Panhard oil supply was designed to be a low flow, low oil pressure system, but I haven’t really explained why.

Originally the engine had a lot of roller bearings inside it, and crucially the crankshaft was suspended using these. In fact cylindrical roller bearing set ups are making a come back in engine design, especially in the USA where Timken are applying this to some current engines, to showcase the technology again, and also promote their own bearing interests. One of the reasons they are using it, is to reduce pumping losses, and the frictional drag reductions against the more common plain bearing engines, because there is an environmental need to make combustion engines more economical.



The Panhard engine was quite clever in that it used a small pump to get the oil roughly where it was needed, and then the centrifugal effect of the slingers in the crankshaft webs gave a speed related response to the engine needs. This was a good fit with the requirements of the engine, and although there was a maintenance issue with slingers clogging up, mileages were not great in the late 1940’s when the engine was being designed, and a 30,000 mile target wasn’t unreasonable. Fast forward to the 21st Century and maybe some things would be different now, and if you look at the evolution of a similar engine, the BMW R50 motorcycle, that moved from centrifugal oil supply to a cross drilled crank, and the more common one piece crankshaft & split connecting rods with plain bearings.

Aside from the maintenance issue with the slingers, there is nothing really wrong with the original oil pump, but if you read the history books you might be lead to believe otherwise. Here is the pump, and it is a gear type oil pump, which was a current design around the time, and it is more than adequate for the job. There are a couple of issues, that if it was being made today, that you would change, but I’ll elaborate later.The first one is, there are no rounded edges from the oil pump body into the output drilling, which is 90 degrees to it, and this will cause back pressure and cavitation, at higher oil volumes .



So if I was going to do one thing to address this, it would involve using a Dremel and doing this.



This modified oil pump will now flow more oil at speed, when you want it and there will be less bubbles in the oil as a result, which has the effect of improving the oil quality. I have successfully done this on three engines to date, and did test it out on the oil filter crankcase test rig many years ago. It is beneficial, and is one way of simply boosting the nett oil flow, but there is a bigger win win at the crankcase entry. If you were trying to maximise flow, you wouldn’t squeeze a garden hose pipe, but that’s exactly what Panhard did, because the crankcase oil inlet from the pump is 4.8mm diameter, yet the pump output is 7mm in diameter, which is almost a 50% reduction in cross sectional area. So after radiussing the outlet of the pump body there is an even bigger restriction downstream, and all the oil for the engine is fed by this small hole. It really doesn’t make sense with hindsight



You can see the small inlet pipe into the crankcase, and also see where the oil pump mates up to it, which is the black circle I have inked in and the centre of the outlet is represented by the black lines. So again the flexible shaft is used to reshape this area, and the important thing is to match the mating diameters more closely. It makes sense to machine and open up this drilling to match the oil pump, as this will increase the flow rate into the main oil galleries, and it has no effect on the pressure of the system, contrary to what you might think. The pressure in the unmodified camshaft is controlled by the cross drilling after this, and the cylinder head feeds likewise by the size of their respective openings too.



Crankcase main oil gallery modified to match oil pump outlet diameter.

A quick history lesson on Panhard engine failures. The front main bearing and front cylinder crankshaft big end started to develop failures, as they increased the horsepower. It was attributed to insufficient oil supply, and so the front end lubrication was revised, and the camshaft timing gears were used as a splash lubrication system and the oil drilling that provided that role under the front main bearing was removed. This modification was introduced from around the early 1960’s, and ran to the end of production in 1967.

Unfortunately for Panhard they were barking up the wrong tree, despite the engine coming from a well thought out design originally, other people tinkered with the design knee jerk fashion as the problems developed, and nobody took an overview and look at the root causes. The financial woes and Citröen management probably didn’t help, but as Panhard died in 1967, we will never really know.

Flash forward to the next century, and if you are running one of these engines, it will almost be suffering from the result of this modification. As the engine ages the oil pump becomes more marginal, so the front bearings don’t really fatigue like they used to, but the rears suffer now. So the problem has transferred itself, and the question that should be asked is why?

Of course if you look at the development of these engines you will read about the engines modified for endurance racing, which had higher capacity pumps, and an increased oil capacity with the fitment of an additional sump, that also acted as a baffled cavity for the oil pick up pipe. This subset of development has been an evolutionary branch of Panhard engine that needs revising, because if you really look at the problem, these solutions are papering over the cracks of a design fault. If you go back in time, and look at the engine design of the Panhard flat twin compared to others, there are numerous good points taken from lots of influences. The crankshaft oil supply is reminiscent of Bugatti & the early BMW motorcycle engine, but it is essentially a low pressure system, and even the design of the original plain bearing surfaces reflect this, so why fit a higher pressure set up, but that’s another story.



For example in the front bearing of the camshaft, which has a very large diameter at the front where the timing gear is driven by the crankshaft, and a more normal sized bearing diameter at the rear. Also, if you look at the oil drillings that feed these plain bearings, they are proportionately scaled to suit. The camshaft is the common denominator in all of this because it is one of three main oil feeds from the oil pump, and the supply conduit for the front and rear main bearings and the crankshaft lubrication, but wasn’t there a problem here?

So how can a central oil gallery that feeds both the front and rear crankshafts be at fault? Actually, the central gallery is not the problem, because the flow into this is separate from the outputs, and if you look at these, the problem is almost explained. The original design knew he needed to equalise the distribution of the oil, so the oil outputs for the front and rear crankshaft feeds are phased to do just this, and as the cross drillings are on a rotating surface the timing window on the camshafts are scaled accordingly. However, although the rear crankshaft oil drilling is sized to match the rear camshaft drilling, the front is mismatched, because the oil drilling in the crankcase is too small.

On examination the oil drilling needs to be around 6mm diameter, when it is only 4mm, which is a 50% reduction in oil supply compared to the rear, and this alone would explain the front end failure susceptibility, but it doesn’t end there. The original designer tried to phase the oil supply to the front and rear ends equally, but somebody decided the camshaft timing gear at the front should have some more lubrication, and put in an additional drilling. The reality was that the original plain bearing would have leaked into this cavity, and as there were no low level drainage holes, the oil wouldn’t go away, so it really didn’t need the additional drilling, but the biggest problem was where it was positioned. The oil pump doesn’t need to be big, as the engine only needed low flow rates and low pressure to work within it original design specifications, however any pressure drop say after a drilling would take a little time to recover, and this was accepted in the design layout, but as soon as the oil drilling to the front timing gear was placed ahead of the front end oil supply, the 50% reduction in flow rate all things being equal just got worse, as this drilling lost pressure after 60 degrees of a 90 degree recovery window, and only gave the camshaft 30 degrees to recover the oil pressure in the gallery. This means the front crankshaft oil feeds are compromised further, whereas the rears are unaffected, and it was all down to a simple production oversight.

What is the solution? Again, a quick history lesson will tell you all you need to know, and it is the route of many flat twin Panhard devotees, but don’t bother looking at the history books, what you have to do is engine specific, but that’ll be for another day. Suffice to say, I spotted this many years ago, and have been making parts and modding a few engines to overcome these oil related faults every time I get hold of one.

I have made several distributor based electronic ignition prototypes over the years, and although cost effective, they all have a lack of precision, because they run through the existing drive mechanisms, which are a slotted drive on the end of a geared oil pump, which is powered by another gear on the gear driven camshaft.

Ultimately I need to fit a crankshaft timing trigger to this engine, as part of the ongoing ignition & fuelling developments, and the traditional locations for these are the flywheel or front pulley. If I want to gear this up for retrospective and easy fitment, the flywheel really is out of the question, because this is an engine out exercise in a Panhard, and that is a no brainer.

That now means the front pulley arrangement has the most potential, and that is what the majority of modern car manufacturers use anyway. Although it is possible to add a trigger wheel to the existing pulley, like I have done in my bench testing to date, there is a slight variance in sizes that negates this. It’s my philosophy to always make new parts wherever possible, so that old ones don’t get destroyed unnecessarily. At the same time there might be other design changes or benefits you can bring to this area, so for example I can incorporate a modern oil seal, assuming you tweak the timing gear casing, and also make the pulley rebuildable. If this is not to your liking, and you want to keep the OEM piston ring seal the design can be modified to accommodate this too, by replacing the yellow part for another.

Latest CAD thoughts are pictured below, and the pulley now has a renewable inner ring shown in yellow, which acts as a running surface for the double lipped oil seal. The aluminium parts in blue now have a location dowel for timing purposes. The trigger wheel shown in purple is also a standard 60-2 pattern, which gives improved triggering over the lesser toothed versions I was experimenting with.






Next up, look at the VR sensor support bracket, chase up the pistons, and hopefully acquire a boring machine.

Another few hours spent on this, testing various iterations of the firmwares with my cased MicroSquirts, and revisiting yesterdays efforts, as I made a number of teeth input error part way through my previous attempts. This only affects the early B&G firmware and MSExtra as they need the correct value inputting, whereas the later B&G 3.760 has an auto detect function called Auto Trigger.

A quick screenshot of TunerStudio doing its stuff using the logging tools. The cyan columns are the 11 teeth, the gap the 12th missing tooth, and the red line on the bottom is the Sync errors, and because this line is straight there are none. Using MSExtra 3.1.0, I can get reliable sync from 45 rpm up to 11800 rpm using the Renault sensor and a 2mm air gap. I think if the trigger wheel is made thicker, it will allow me to increase the air gap to nearer 3mm, and I might make the teeth slightly less wide too.



The screenshot below shows the tooth pattern, the 11vertical lines roughly the same size are the physical bumps or teeth, and the tallest column is the missing tooth area. This is what the ECU is seeing, but as this is using the motorised engine rig, so the variances between the 11 teeth are not very pronounced. However when this is used on a real engine the compression effects and the resulting slowing down of the trigger wheel attached to the crankshaft, shows itself in bigger variances in height.

I managed to get a few timing wheels laser cut the other day, and the idea was to combine these with a Renault crankshaft sensor, so that I can create a timing trigger for the electronic ignition. I had done this with an earlier project, but now wanted to refine the set up further to allow for the fuel injection mods that will follow from this.

Here’s a pic of the first design effort, and there’s me thinking that a 3mm thick wheel would be sufficient for a 2mm sensor tip. At first it didn’t seem like it would be, and the disturbing thing is there is a slight eccentricity with these OEM pulleys, so a wider wheel might be useful to combat this. The reason why it wasn’t working as well as it should have done, was because I was putting the wrong values into the Number of Teeth box. I was inputting 8-1, when it was plainly a 12-1 wheel!


I was also swapping various v2 MicroSquirts & a v3 beta running different EFI firmwares including MSExtra 3.1 and, B&G 2.890, 3.430 & 3.760.



This 12-1 wheel design worked OK up to 3000 rpm, but then dropped out of sync, whereas the 6mm thick 36-1 wheel using the same sensor worked faultlessly from 50-11780 rpm, so despite the initial input error, the trigger wheel is too thin.



This is the old washing machine motor from a 1986 Hotpoint ℅ Siemens Gmbh dropped into my DIY engine rig. I have had to fit a poly-vee belt reduction gear, as this thing will rev to 22,000 RPM in 1:1 mode!

Note. Bottom right, inside the chevron cut fibre camshaft timing gear are the revised oil light pistons I made in the 1990’s to combat the lubrication faults with the Panhard engine. The picture below shows an incomplete one, with the revised lubrication to the timing gear (there is a relief valve, ball, spring with a set screw yet to be inserted in the middle).



Also can you spot the crankshaft & cam rig in the background, above this picture, which is still being used to develop the MicroSquirt based EFI systems for the GTS1000 & Thunderace motorcycle engines :)

The original oil light was a machined cast lump…



so I created this replacement in mild steel. This is the basic part, because I hand finish this further.



This is used with other mods to refine the Panhard oil lubrication circuits. The nose was rounded in the picture below to prevent wearing out the wooden plug that pushes the oil light contact, once the engine gets up to pressure.

I happened to be stripping an engine to use in my EFI project, and I came across this, which was an earlier prototype 1990’s part that I fitted to an engine in 2002, and because I was relying on splash and bleeding from the oil ways nearby, it didn’t need the cross drilling.



Interestingly, there is no wear to the wooden block below, and additionally there is no cross drilling to increase the oil supply to the camshaft timing gears this version, whereas there was in later engines I built. One of the reasons for examining this, was the owner said the camshaft gear was noisier than he remembered previously, and although the aluminium gear is when compared against the OEM fibre wheel, I’d thought I’d investigate further.



Picture above shows the oil light insulator button from inside the camshaft timing gear case, which acts an insulator and breaks the brass contact for the dash mounted low oil pressure warning light earth loop, but only as the oil pressure in the hollow camshaft gallery builds up.
It’s more remarkable, because this particular engine had very little additional lubrication, other than a little splash bleed from nearby oil galleries, and was the first one where I altered the crankcase lubrication circuits.

This is great news, as I now don’t need to do the brass nosing mod, as shown below, which I did in 2004.





This was done to an earlier engine rebuild for a two bladed fan Dyna engine, because I was concerned about the potential friction that the hollow threaded tip of the piston might create.



This is the later revision to the oil light circuit, and although it’s incomplete, you can see there is a cross drilling that is exposed once the oil pressure builds up in the camshaft gallery. The relief valve can be set, so that the first priority is the crankshaft big end rollers, and the hole size can be varied if more lubrication is needed to these timing gears. However, as this oil feed is off the central oil gallery within the camshaft, there is no pressure fluctuations as the camshaft rotates to either big end bearing, so eliminating all the developmental faults that were introduced as the years went by.

Panhard cylinder heads and barrels are a one piece assembly, very similar to early aero engines, which incidentally removes any chance of head gasket failures, but this makes machining them awkward. Technology has moved on and it’s not the norm to manufacture engines like this, and in fact Porsche engines pro rata manage to make more horsepower using similar materials incorporating head gaskets, without suffering from reliability issues.

For my engine work, it was always going to be necessary to revisit the cylinder construction, and again many years ago I separated a head from a cylinder, as a design exercise to investigate the feasibility of modifying these components, and making new parts. I remember doing this in the lathe, and the cooling fins from the barrel only just cleared the toolholder, but when they were separated and you could see the individual pieces, it was obvious to me this was the only way to go, if you wanted to bring the engines into the 21st century. Panhard tapered the liners, and used split skirt pistons with hemispherical combustion chambers, which was OK in the 1940s, but current combustion chamber thinking is moving towards minimal surface areas and squish, with reduced ignition advance.

Cylinder and coating technology has moved on as well, so whereas VW would use a Biral cylinder in the 80’s, quite similar to a Panhard with a steel liner and aluminium finning, others in motorcycling and karting were using all aluminium construction for their cylinder construction with Nikasil plating for the piston surfaces. Early plating processes were responsible for a few engine failures over time, with plating separation at the head gasket/ cylinder interfaces causing all sorts of issues, especially in higher performance engines with detonation.

Fortunately, thanks in part to the space programme and the accelerated development of ceramics, there are better alternatives available now with amazing potential. Aluminium is now used in tool steel injection moulding machines with coatings applied, that offer better thermal and longer life than their steel equivalents, plus the coating deposition processes have become much better environmentally and from a tribological viewpoint are now second to none and so used extensively in high performance engines.

What does this mean for Panhards, well you could remove the heads, make new cylinders with increased finning to dissipate the heat, just like others did in WWII, as air cooled engine performance was boosted in fighter aircraft. At the same time, eliminate the steel liner using modern coating technology, and safely increase the performance margins, as a cooler cylinder would keep heat away from the cylinder heads, and no liner would negate differing thermal expansion rates. The coatings technology would secure long life, corrosion protection and a restoration route if required.

A standard cylinder has eight fins under the head like the drawing below.



Mine will have...well you have to wait! Anyway there are other priorities first, because there’s no use making cylinders that increase performance, as the crankshaft is undoubtedly the weakest link. Peter Breed in Holland offers a first class crankshaft service, with bespoke connecting rods and new pistons to rebored OEM cylinders. It is a good system, and was the most cost effective route at the time, and probably still is. How do I know, well I worked with Peter on this solution, but it relies on a having a salvageable crankshaft at the start and that’s why I am developing a new remanufacturing process, because I want to salvage these tired, pitted and corroded crankshafts.