50+ and proud of it.

I'm ashamed to admit that I gave in and took the 106 to the main dealer... "What's wrong with it?" "It's using too much fuel and the CO is way too high at 13%, and it's coking up the plugs". I then proceeded to give the woman behind the counter the long history of what I had, and had not, fiddled with. I stopped when her eyes glazed over and I started to visualise her as the old woman in Airplane . I went home on the train. 2 hours later: "Hello, it's all fixed. It was your O 2 sensor" "Erm, is that the same O 2 sensor as the one I changed for a brand new one? Oh well, so long as it's fixed. What the CO reading now?" "Oh, he's a technician, not an MOT man he wouldn't check the CO." "Do you think that might be a good idea on the grounds that that was the original problem? It'll take 2 minutes to shove the pipe thingy up the exhaust to check won't it?" 3 hours after the first 2 hours: ...

...really, really annoyed. I fixed my daughter's Pug a treat except that the stupid ECU won't learn that the throttle position sensor (TPS) has been moved - and repaired. It now is over-injecting (13% CO, 24mpg, coked up plugs, ergo, engine stops after a while and you have to remove the plugs and clean them to get it going again. It's a "Peugeot main dealer thing" to reset the ECU. There's nowhere on the net that tells me what the two pins are that I have to connect a 9v battery to reset the ram. ...still waiting for the Pug dealer to "get back to me" and no doubt going "ho ho ho, that's a bank loan for that mate." I have however found a nice 1999 model on eBay...

For some weeks now my daughter's Peugeot 106 has been randomly misfiring and/or cutting out and generally misbehaving. Therefore it makes sense to randomly replace things rather than to sit down and logically work out what's wrong. Armed with an eBay user name and a bank account I have bought "some bits" and replaced them - funnily enough - to no avail. Today I replaced the last item before throwing in the towel and taking it to a Peugeot dealer. I replaced the ECU temperature sender with a new one from the local parts shop. Plugged it in, plugged it out - no difference. Let's have a think. Tick over fine, open throttle and it works, move throttle a bit more and it stops, open throttle some more and it works. Close throttle and it stops... I eventually decided that this reminded me of the "old days" when the volume control on a radio needed cleaning when the sound, rather than increasing slowly as you turned up the volume, crackled and leaped from ...