Car dramas
It never rains it pours.
On monday the Mazda wouldn’t start. It would crank but not start. I think the fuel pump is going or there’s something else electrical going on in relation to the fuel pump. Or perhaps it’s just a blocked fuel filter. Dad and I will have a go a fixing it on the weekend which should be fairly easy. I’ve been catching the bus to the train station (and back) this week. It ads between 30-45 minutes to my total commute over driving to the station which isn’t bad at all.
On Thursday my wife rang me to say that the Peugeot was “shuddering”. Yay. I was at work so I asked Dad to pop over to our place and have a listen and a look. “Sounds like it’s running on 3 cylinders,” he said. This model of Pug has an engine that runs coil-on-plug and the coils have a deserved reputation for dying. Driving it in to the specialist Pug place on Friday (today) it started fine and ran smoothly until it dropped the coil again and began to sound like a WRX with a ‘sik exhaust bro’. I suspect that the harmonic balancer pulley is also on the way out given the lovely squealing noise that it makes on start-up sometimes. Neither of these things are something I have the skill or time to fix myself and they certainly aren’t something that I’d leave to a non-specialist mechanic. Not that Peugeots like mine are overly complicated compared to other early 90s FWD cars, they’re just French, originally made for a LHD market so things are a little screwy on RHD market cars and they’re not so well known in Oz. And for some reason they have a twin firewall which shrinks the engine-bay which means that you have to unpack things to do anything more complicated than check the oil. Not that there aren’t Japanese cars where the same is true.
4 comments on “Car dramas”
Leave a Reply
Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Duotone by Automattic.
Cars hate us. Not as much as computers do, but they still hate us. I suggest that you cut your losses with the 1500, sell it and buy one with a 13BT for four times as much. It’s the only sensible option in a situation like this….
at least its not a suzuki GTi where miniture Japanese only sized hands are required to work on nearly everything in the engine bay.
I’ll take a pic of the engine bay. It’s quite full.
I feel your pain. And the VR-4 has an imminent engine re-build in it’s future.