Author: Mike Tippett

I bought the white 1966 404 Coupé in February 1989, about a month after the birth of our first daughter, Jennifer. I also had just finished a second degree at university and freshly equipped with more credentials, I was looking for a proper career-type job. Right after graduation, I was on short-term contracts at a BC Government office for an entire year. So: new family responsibilities, not a lot of money, and a second old, needy car, sketchy job.  I hoped to land “the career job” soon, and once in the “big money”, could I expect to restore the 404C soon?

The better job offer came at the end of 1989. Starting in January 1990, we relocated to the mountainous “Interior” of British Columbia, in the beautiful West Kootenays.  The 1963 404 sedan was showing its age with a lot of structural rust, and on the 650 km drive from Vancouver to our new home, the holes in the floor were providing my wife an unwelcome below zero draught on her ankles.  Jenn was in a tethered child seat in the middle of the rear seat. We had the Michelin XM+S 100 snow tires on the rear wheels only, and the car was actually amazingly good in the snow. But one day in February, the turn indicators stopped working, and then a headlight. In both cases it was electrical grounds that had corroded away – not the wiring connector, the body underneath it had dissolved! One of the indicators even fell out of the front fender and was suspended only by its wires. I pop-riveted some aluminium in and remounted them, but the end was nigh, and it was time to get a newer car. In April 1990, we bought a red 27,000 km 1985 Renault 5 TL, 1400 cc, later modified to higher spec, and that became the family car, and not 10 months afterwards, our second child Sean was born and then, in late 1993, our third child Julia came along.

At the start of 1990 the white 404 Coupé was still in the Vancouver area, in a rented garage. I had a contact on Vancouver Island that recommended we visit a restoration shop to get an estimate. This shop was located near Mill Bay, on Whittaker Road, in a very rural area. I drove with my wife and Jenn in the R5 to Vancouver, left Jenn with her grandparents, collected the 404C and drove it on a temporary plate to the ferry, crossed to Victoria and found our way to the shop. The place was chocker block with wallet melting projects, mostly Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gullwings being restored. The owner of the restoration shop had a good look at the 404C and said that it looked like an honest car, and it would probably take 400-500 hours of work to do the shell justice. His labour rate at the time was $50 per hour, cheaper than a dealer’s shop rates, but not by much.  500 hours at $50 per hour was more than half of my annual gross salary, so I realized then it was going to be a long-term project. The best advice I got at the time was to buy all the factory sheet metal that I could, in preparation for the eventual restoration.

Meanwhile, I began to research the car’s history. Hugh Roberts, the second owner, had told me that the first owner was a judge on the British Columbia Supreme Court named Lloyd McKenzie. Armed with this information, I called him. Lloyd was happy to hear from me and he told me that he was a lawyer living in Victoria BC in 1966-1973, and that he had first heard of the fuel injected 404C being available in Canada in a 1966 edition of the Canadian magazine “Canada Track & Traffic”. This was the first model year that a Pininfarina-built Peugeot was sold here. Presumably none were in British Columbia dealers at the time, and so in 1967 when he ventured to eastern Canada to visit Toronto and Montréal, he sought out a Peugeot dealer in Brampton who happened to have a 1966 white 404 Coupé Injection in their showroom. He bought the car and drove it to Montréal to see Expo67. Traveling at a high rate of speed, he was rewarded with a speeding ticket. The officer said that he had been clocked at over 100 MPH on the 401 freeway. When asked about the car, Lloyd said, “it’s fuel injected” and the officer replied, “I thought it might have been rocket powered!” Lloyd McKenzie traded the 404C in at a North Vancouver BMW dealer in 1973 in favour of a new 3.0 CSi, celebrating his appointment as a judge and Hugh bought it about a year later.

Many years later, I began to research Peugeot dealers in the Toronto/Brampton area in the mid-1960s. On a 2004 driving trip across Canada in a Mercedes C230K, we went to a library in Brampton and got photocopies from the Yellow Pages of the names of Peugeot dealers in the area. There were two: Derry West, and Kalsbeek Motors. Which one…? Then as the Internet got more prominent, I started searching for clues. On night I 2018 I got a needle in a haystack hit on a website called pier21, with stories of immigrants to Canada. Here is the relevant excerpt by John Kalsbeek:

 “In 1965 the business (Derry West) in Norval was sold and the lease with SHELL was terminated. I went to work at a Stonehouse Ford in Brampton. Dad bought a nearly new building in Bramalea that was originally built for a commercial photographer who had gone bankrupt two years earlier. This building was ideal for a small car dealership. Dad and Jan went into business together with a dealership for Peugeot cars and Honda motorcycles. In the evening I sometimes helped out with the assembly of the motorbikes. A lawyer from Victoria, B.C. dropped in the showroom one day and bought an expensive Peugeot 404 fuel injected coupe convertible, with the condition that dad would deliver it to him personally in Victoria. That was a wonderful opportunity for my parents to visit family in Vancouver, because two of my mother’s sisters and my brother Bill and his wife lived there. After their return we got to hear all the stories, how beautiful it was in B.C. It did not take long before the business was sold to another Peugeot dealer in Toronto.”

The search to find new 404C body panels was my next task, after the restoration shop visit. A fellow member of the US-based Peugeot Owners’ Club, Joe Wagner in Cincinnati had a pair of 404C front fenders for sale, new old stock. I made a deal with him over the phone to buy the pair for $500 USD, a price that was fair to both him and me, I think (today, if you can find one, each panel would cost 1000 Euros). They were put on a truck and delivered to a freight depot in Spokane Washington, and with a roof rack on the Renault 5 we collected them and brought them back to our home in Rossland BC. By then I had a single car garage, and the 404C was in it, along with the new floors I had bought in Germany in 1988.

Some years later, a Peugeot specialist in Ontario posted on a listserv called “Peugeot-L” a note entitled “life ain’t long enough” and among the content in the post that followed is that he would never restore the 404 Cabriolet that had been (and still is) in his garage for a couple of decades, so the NOS panels he had saved up for it would be for sale. Two new rear fenders – L and R – one new sill, a rear under bumper “snow shield” and a few other minor bits. I bought all that in 2004 for $1100 CAD, which I think was a fair price.

I also had picked up what I could in Europe: a new engine hood in 1995 from Sochaux – the car’s original is perforated with rust on the inner framework – and also a pair of inner headlight rings that are welded to the fenders and that support the headlamp buckets. A pair of McPherson strut tower reinforcements and rear jack mounts came from Joern Haarmann in Germany. I was collecting other parts too, like a new KF2 head form Sochaux – bought in 1990, and much more…

I then cast my mind to the question of where the bodyshell should be restored. I knew that there was an excellent restoration shop in Victoria, not 90 km from our home, which was world renowned for restoring 300 SL cars. In fact, it turned out that the place we had driven to in 1990 in the 404C was their body shop at the time. Coachwerks’ portfolio included the 300 SL Roadster that was bought new in 1960 by former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, whose son – our current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, had sent it across the continent a couple of years before for an integral restoration. The restoration company, run by Rudi Koniczek, was called Rudi & Co. and so I sent them an email to see if I could have a tour of the facility. It was granted in a laconic reply and so on my birthday in March 2014, a close friend and I made the pilgrimage. I doubted that I could afford for all the work to be done by a shop, but I needed a great body shop for the reconstruction.

Not long after arriving for our tour, we realized that there were no metal working facilities there, so I asked Rudi where the bodies were done. “Coachwerks” was the answer. Excellent! Apart from getting this intel on Coachwerks, we did have a close look at various cars in assorted states of reassembly, including an Avions Voisin, several 300 SLs, a couple of Ferraris among others.

Rudi was a generous host and asked us if we’d like to go to “The Vault”. “Yes please” we replied, so we piled into his Mercedes E 550 station wagon and took a winding route out to some chicken barns in Saanich near Victoria. Inside the barns was a mouthwatering collection of old exotics, along with some mundane new stuff.

The next step was to contact Mike Grams, owner of Coachwerks. I dropped by one day and spoke to him about the 404C. I assumed he’d need to see the 404C to make an estimate but he said that the Pininfarina-built cars were all constructed similarly and he felt it would cost about $50,000 CAD plus tax to do the job, knowing that I had a good supply of original body panels for it, and if the shell was entirely stripped by me. I got on the waiting list in mid-2015 and awaited the call, which Mike had said would be around 1.5-2 years off.

In November 2016 we were visiting our daughters in Prince George BC and I got a call from Mike Grams. “We have an opening for your car, provided you can get it to us, totally stripped to the bare shell, by January 3, 2017.”

Upon arriving home around November 13^th, the disassembly began in my crowded home garage. I was still working my regular day job but every night involved at least three hours in the garage, dismantling the car and taking photos along the way. Weekends were mostly taken with garage work. Before Christmas, it was stripped.

I called a flatbed to take it down and at the very end of December, the stripped shell was on its way. The front suspension was still there, but could be removed with only 12 bolts, and the rear axle was located with the gearbox out by bolting the torque tube directly to the transmission mount, ten easy bolts and/or nuts to remove it all.

For the next 9 months, the 404C was in Coachwerks’ shop and I paid her weekly visits on Fridays to see the weekly progress. I also set to restoring the various mechanical components from the car, back in the now cavernous home garage, only encumbered with a 2.5 metre long smart cabriolet.