Peugeot 206 GTi
August 2009
A friend of the family was telling me about her Peugeot 206 that had failed it’s MOT in spectacular fashion, no surprise there I thought. She then told me how it had sat on a driveway for a few months where some children had vandalised it; keying a few panels and kicking in the front wing.
As it turned out, the car had low mileage, a very good service history and was actually a GTi. It looked very sorry for itself but it had potential for sure.
I decided to take it on as a bit of a project (my Mazda was tediously reliable and I needed something to sink my teeth into)
With the car at least clean I set about getting it road worthy. The MOT failure sheet wasn’t as long as I suspected but the items were costly, it had failed on:
- All the brake discs and pads being worn/pitted
- Both front lower arms were worn
- Worst of all the rear axle had play in the radius arm bearing
Along with some other smaller failures and some advisories.
After reading up on a very useful Peugeot 206 forum, I found out that the rear axle failure is not uncommon but is still expensive to fix. The bearings around the rear radius arm stub pin tend to collect water, corrode and fail. This usually results in such a failure that the wheel makes contact with the inner arch.
I jacked the rear of the car up and pulled the wheels around to see if I could feel any movement. All I could detect was a very very small, minute in fact, amount of movement in one rear radius arm. No tell tale signs of scrubbing inside the arch or uneven tyre wear.
Before going any further I took the car to the same garage I would later book it’s MOT at and spoke to the owner. He carried out the same test as I did and we both agreed that due to the extremely minimal amount of movement, it hadn’t failed catastrophically and the bearing could just be replaced. As the bearings need to be pressed in place with hydraulic equipment (which I don’t own) I would let the garage do this job.
For peace of mind I also wanted to fit a new cambelt and waterpump but after reading some horror stories on how difficult the job was, I decided against doing this for the first time myself.
I booked the car into the garage for this work to be done and then an MOT test. Sadly I had a call a few days later telling me to come and have a look at the axle.
The mechanic had removed the radius arm only to discover the stub pin was severely corroded and damaged. It would be therefore pointless to fit a new bearing to it and the only course of action was to remove the axle and send it off for refurbishment.
This is where hindsight is a brilliant thing; if I’d have known the rear axle had to be removed and sent off, I could have done that myself. No special tools required, just a bit of patience and brute force. However because the car was already in the garage with one arm off (and impossible to put back on) I had to fork out the labour bill for the garage to remove the axle.
I then collected it, brought it home and prepared it ready for refurbishment.
It had to be sent off half way up the country to be done and would spent 5 days there. With the axle back, I took it back to the garage where they could re-fit it.
A few days later I received a call from the garage saying the car was done but the mechanic had his suspicions about how the torsion bars had been set up. It was a bitter sweet moment when I picked the car up as although it was now fully road worthy and mechanically sorted, the rear end was sat about 40mm higher than it should have been.
Even though the refurbishment was guaranteed, it would have meant taking the whole axle back off the car and sending it off again, something I didn’t want to waste my time doing, so I set up the torsion bars correctly myself. The only saving grace here was that because it had already been taken apart once, nothing was seized or stuck in place and I was able to do the job in about an hour.
Finding a GOOD bodyshop who don’t charge an extortionate amount is a very hard thing to do. The problem is that if you use somewhere you’ve not used before, by the time the job is done, if you’re not happy with it, it’s already been done.
I needed some PDR done on the car and through a company I’ve used before, I was recommended a local specialist who came round and did a great job. While he was here I asked him is he could recommend any good local bodyshops; he got straight on his phone and called his friend to get a quote. The next day I popped down there to show them the car and discuss exactly what was needed and we agreed that I would strip various parts of the car in order to keep the labour costs down. A few days later I dropped the car off confident that it would come back looking great again. Having my eye for detail really is a curse because I can’t say I was 100% happy but I was 98% and the car was looking fantastic.
With the mileage of the car being as low as it was, the interior had worn rather badly considering. Again, a common issue on these cars but something I wasn’t happy about. After replacing countless plastic clips and screws etc I used a Liquid Leather product to restore the cracked half leather seats.
I had every intention of keeping this car as I thought it was about time I owned something in keeping with my age and not 4 door family saloons, but it just wasn’t me. It was a very fun car to drive and had all the creature comforts to keep my happy but the sloppy gear change and long clutch travel stopped it from being a very capable little hot hatch in my opinion.
By this point I had spent a fair chunk of money on this car BUT it was completely sorted. A host of new parts and a going over a fine toothed comb had made it one of the best 138bhp GTi’s I think you could want. That was evident when the first person who came to see it bought it.
