dan

Just a quick follow up on the previous post -  I’ve had the car back for 6 days now and it has so far proved very solid. Starts on first turn of the key, runs as it should, pulls like a train and doesn’t lose coolant! yay!!

All in all, the mechanic changed the engine, cambelt, waterpump, clutch, air con seals and some other stuff I can’t remember!

Unfortunately my perfectionism is picking up loads of other trivial issues. Gladly none of them are mechanical, just little things like the parcel shelf squeaking, the steering wheel not being in great cosmetic shape, the towbar on the back looking  s-a-d! .. etc! All things I can sort out myself though!

Looks like my luck has finally changed.

Had major, expensive car issues recently.

Lucy was going back to work so we needed a second car. She gave me the option of getting whatever I wanted, if that meant she could have primary use of our new Hyundai i30. I like the i30, but have always been frustrated by it’s lack of power (it’s only a 1.4 petrol), so thought this was a great idea.

My previous car was a Peugeot 306 D Turbo, a great little car that had sadly had a hard life. It was 16 years old and had 185k miles in the clock. It was also costing me every other month in maintenance and repairs. I still loved the car though so it seemed a no brainer to search for something similar, but much newer.

I did my research and decided I wanted a Peugeot 306 HDi. This was a 2.0 Turbo Diesel car that superseded my original Pug, and returned even better MPG. Seemed to fit my needs perfectly.  I searched meticulously for almost a month as I wanted a specific specification, the ‘Meridian’, as this was top of the range and had half leather seats, air con, and all the other bits you expect as standard these days (yet this would have cost quite a bit more in it’s day).

I was using Autotrader and eBay to look for cars and as the weeks went by I found a few that met my requirements and made my enquiries, I even agreed to buy one before the seller got cold feet the day I was due to collect. He wanted another £100 for it, and I didn’t want to pay that. I was also none to pleased to be dicked around so walked away from the deal on pure principle.

Time was ticking by, and the date Lucy was returning to work was edging ever closer. Then one night a car popped up on eBay that particularly caught my eye. It was the exact spec I wanted, low mileage (100k, which is nothing for the HDi engine), it was also a 2001 model. The latter really caught my attention as all cars registered after March 1st 2001 are taxed based on their emissions. This meant that tax for the car was £125 a year as opposed to £210 for any pre 2001 car with this particular HDi engine. As such, the 2001 Pug 306 HDi is VERY sought after as they stopped making these cars later that year.

I contacted the seller, he made all the right noises and was very friendly. He was based in Penzance, which is a heck of a trek from my neck of the woods, but I found that it was incredibly cheap to get a train down there if you went in the middle of the day. It seemed I had found exactly what I had been looking for so I asked the seller if he would take a fixed price for the car and remove it from eBay, eg sell it to me without me having to wait until the auction ended and saving the stress of not knowing if the car was mine for another week. Time was not on my side afterall.

The seller agreed to take the car off eBay for a small deposit. We agreed on a price of £1600, which was superb for this car. parkers.co.uk valued a car of this age with average mileage at £2100. It seemed like a great deal! Too good to be true? … read on!

I travelled down a couple of days later, the seller picked me up from the train station and let me drive the car back to his house. It drove fine . We spent 15 minutes looking over the car, he led the way and I let him as I really don’t know much about cars. In my eyes it looked great, it drove great, it wasn’t leaking oil etc. So, I agreed to buy. I went into the blokes house, he offered me a cup of tea. He was very friendly, even topping up the oil, coolant and windscreen washer before I drove it away. He came across as a top bloke. Thirty minutes later I was driving the car home, very happy indeed.

The journey home was fine, but as I entered Bridgwater I noticed the coolant warning light had come on. I thought this was odd, but figured it just needed topping up and i’d look in the morning. I did just that, topped it up. Drove down the road and the light came on again. I checked the level and it had dropped, so I topped it up and drove it again. Same thing happened. I checked to see if the coolant was leaking anywhere, but it wasn’t.

A long line of investigation followed, firstly with some instructions from a friend who knows his cars, and then from the brilliant forum users on www.pug306.net

We narrowed the root cause down to a failing head gasket! Basically, we believed the failing gasket was leaking water into the engine (hence why I couldn’t figure out where it was going). I called all the garages in my local area and was quoted a minimum of £700 just to replace the gasket, and was told that the head itself could be cracked..if it was, to add another £700!!

I sat back and realised I had been ripped off big time. The seller clearly knew the car had this problem, hence topping up the coolant before I left. He’d only owned the car for 2 months yet when selling it he made out he didn’t need it anymore. My arse  …he knew it was fucked. He really must have seen me coming … some geezer who knows shit all about cars that he could take for a ride. No wonder he was so keen to take the car off eBay and sell straight to me.

I mulled the situation over for a few days and also discussed it with my Dad. He knows his cars too, and offered some alternative suggestions to where the coolant was going. We thought the coolant cap could be defective, so I got it replaced. it did actually make a difference and I didn’t notice any coolant loss for a few days. Then the problem returned.

I was chatting to a work colleague about it and he suggested getting his brother to take a look. He contacted him on my behalf and quoted me just £700 for the lot to be done. He would even put a recon head on the engine. This seemed like a great option so I took him up on the offer. He had the car for a few days and then called me to break some very bad news to me…

He had taken the head off the engine and found someone had already recently removed it. One of the cylinders was rusted through (due to the water that was leaking through it) and another rusty hole had started to appear in this area. He believed someone had recently had the head off the engine and had put some kind of paste around this hole to temporarily contain it. He suspected the previous owner wanted shot of the car quickly before it cost him a lot of money to repair. Basically, the engine was completed f*cked!!

He gave me the option of bodging it back up so I could sell it on, but there was no way on earth I was prepared to rip someone off the way I had been ripped off. He then suggested replacing the engine. This seemed like a way to expensive option, but once i’d looked into it I found it was a similar cost to the original work that needed to be done.

We then spent the best part of a week looking for an engine. Our preference was out of a rear end accident damaged car, as the engine would probably be fine. Worth taking a risk on at least. We couldn’t find anything of this description that didn’t involve buying the whole car (way too expensive when we just wanted the engine out of it). We then started looking at car dismantlers as they generally offer warranty ..the idea being if the engine was a dud, we could return it (minus my mechanics labour fees of course). We found one in particular but when my mechanic looked at it we found it was just a bare engine with no ancilleries, it would have taken him an age to swap everything over and the labour cost would have started ballooning.

I then came across an advert for the exact engine we were after in an accident damaged car not far away. I called the seller and he was happy for me to come and see it running. Along I went and again it seemed fine. I was not anywhere near as trusting this time though and had learnt numerous other checks I could do to make sure the engine wasn’t a dud. It all checked out fine. The guy was even prepared to remove it from the accident damaged car for me!

I duly did a deal with the guy and sent his address to my mechanic, he then went to pick it up a few days later.

I had a call from him last night to say he had transplanted the engine and it’s running ’sweet as a nut’. I go to collect the car later today!

Ironically, the amount I have spent on the car now brings it up to around it’s market value (a few hundred over). More ironically, if I had bought the original car I agreed to buy for that extra £100 and hadn’t let my principles stand in the way I would have saved myself a lot of cash, not to mention stress!

I am just hoping my luck has changed! Watch this space!