2003 Peugeot 206, to fix or scrap

peige · 29 Jun 2017 at 13:16

Looks like my daughters car has thrown the cam belt. It was a £750 car (1.4 ltr auto 206) brought from facebook a couple of months back and I don't think its a shady deal, just one of those things really. 50k miles and a new mot put on by me.

It broke down tuesday in the rain, complete death on the side of the road with no electrics. Being an auto it was also a pain to get to the garage due to being locked in park but they took it in and diagnosed broken earth strap which was fitted today. On getting the electrics up it now won't even turn over properly, a little digging and he thinks that the tensioner has gone and the belt jumped so he calls me. He thinks the cam belt jumped, the engine jolted and the earth strap broke...

I can't make up my mind if I should just get it home and diy it, get the head off and see if its bent valves and try to sort myself, i'm not a mechanic but know a few and i'm quite technically minded (engineer by trade) or if I should just scrap it now, get a bit of money back and spend towards a new one. My mechanic relative thinks its fixable but worse case can't imagine a new engine costing the earth for it ether...

Its in pretty good nick, just got the mot and passed emissions etc fine at that point. Do I bail or recover it back to my house and have a go?

MooMoo444 · 29 Jun 2017 at 13:20

I thought if your cambelt went, it meant the engine would annihilate itself as everything would not line up anymore. Surely the repair would be more than the cost of the car at £750.

Akagi · 29 Jun 2017 at 13:20

Either buy another one on the cheap, or swap the whole engine. Might be easier?

MooMoo444 said:
I thought if your cambelt went, it meant the engine would annihilate itself as everything would not line up anymore. Surely the repair would be more than the cost of the car at £750.

Depends on the car/engine. For example, on MK1/2 MX5's if the belt jumps or snaps you just have to fit a new belt and do the timing, because nothing collides.

Most engines will lunch themselves though.

peige · 29 Jun 2017 at 13:38

Spoken again to the garage to establish if its toe-able now (ie electrics disengage park) and he says it is. He thinks its got to be worth trying a cambelt kit on it before we declare the engine dead and seems optimistic that it will be ok.. worse case with a new cam belt he said you could tell which cylinder is a problem and lift the head knowing which one to fix. Diy is the price of the kit £50ish. Garage will charge 2/3 hours work,

Still not sure, he was basically saying if it were him he'd take it home and try a cam belt kit...

GeX · 29 Jun 2017 at 14:00

MooMoo444 said:
I thought if your cambelt went, it meant the engine would annihilate itself as everything would not line up anymore. Surely the repair would be more than the cost of the car at £750.

Not always. Some engines are non-interference (sometimes called 'safe') which means that if the cam belt snaps, even with the valves fully open and the piston at TDC there is a gap meaning that damage won't occur. Less common on modern engines with higher compression ratios (or just more valves.. are there any 16v engines like this?). The TU series engine (both 8v and 16v) in the 206 is not an engine like this, and so damage can occur.

peige said:
worse case with a new cam belt he said you could tell which cylinder is a problem and lift the head knowing which one to fix.

Not sure what this means. Could be wrong info, or misinterpreting what he said. If the cam belt is changed, but the engine still isn't running right then the next step would be a compression test. This will help confirm if a valve isn't sealing correctly (because it's bashed into the piston). However, knowing which cylinder is at fault doesn't make any difference to taking the head off - the whole thing comes off.
If it's only jumped one tooth, I guess it's possible that it hasn't done any damage - but if it's jumped far enough to cause the engine to abruptly stop / lurch then that sounds less likely imo.

FWIW, you can pick up a second hand engine off eBay for ~£90 (assume 8v, 16v little bit more)

peige · 29 Jun 2017 at 14:28

If I understand correctly he was saying that even if you lift the head right now you're not necessarly going to be able to tell which cylinder(s) is the problem, fit the belt, try it and hope for the best but if its fails do a compression test to identify the cylinder/ers and then go from there with the knowledge of which ones your dealing with...

Orionaut · 29 Jun 2017 at 14:56

If it is the 8V engine, they are really easy to work on, really easy! if the car is otherwise sound, it would be insane to scrap it. In any case, A TU engine of that age would be likely coming up to a new head gasket anyway (Oil into Water) so you can kill two birds with one stone and get another ten years out of it.

peige · 29 Jun 2017 at 16:12

Ok, thanks everyone. I'm going to give it a new cambelt set and see if she lives.. then go from there.

d_brennen · 29 Jun 2017 at 16:18

If it runs with the belt I'd get the gasket done. That's what got mine in the end. Repair costs exceeded buying another 206 and fitting the gasket because it needed head skim. Otherwise was mechanically sound

Iamzod · 29 Jun 2017 at 18:19

I had a 2.0 16V 406 several years ago where the belt snapped, it bent all of the valves, one of which took a chunk out of the head.

It cost about £450 to repair it including welding the head and buying a new set of valves and stem seals if I remember correct, that was over 10 years ago however.

Boycey0211 · 29 Jun 2017 at 18:51

weirdly enough my last car was a 206 in perfect working order, sold it to my mate for £100 as a favour (his car was completely broken and he couldnt get home to see his kid) and a week later the cambelt went.

Wasn't due for about another 20000 miles and had just had its mot and service etc, just went on the 60mph drive as he was coming back for the weekend.

peige · 30 Jun 2017 at 11:42

New cam belt in, car runs on three. They they diagnosed to injector and tried another, still wrong.. they now think ECU so suggest sending it away for diagnosis but he's also saying some corrosion on connectors so is worried it will be more. No talk of this being valves at all.

I'm thinking this is it now and to put it on gumtree and let somebody else deal with it. ECU repair will be hundred + then will it be fixed? He doesn't think a second hand ECU will work, coding being an issue, even then will it fix it. Arggg!

Macky · 30 Jun 2017 at 15:07

Funnily enough my 2003 206 has just bitten the dust. Engine problems and just been quoted £600 for it to pass its MOT. Time to say goodbye I think, paid £1100 and it's done about 30k miles so not too bad.

acemastr · 30 Jun 2017 at 16:18

peige said:
New cam belt in, car runs on three. They they diagnosed to injector and tried another, still wrong.. they now think ECU so suggest sending it away for diagnosis but he's also saying some corrosion on connectors so is worried it will be more. No talk of this being valves at all.

I'm thinking this is it now and to put it on gumtree and let somebody else deal with it. ECU repair will be hundred + then will it be fixed? He doesn't think a second hand ECU will work, coding being an issue, even then will it fix it. Arggg!

If it's running on 3 and the cam belt snapped I'd be thinking the piston lunched a valve. Very unlikely to be the ECU because.. why would it be?

GeX · 30 Jun 2017 at 16:46

Exactly what I was thinking. Did they compression test it?

hohum · 30 Jun 2017 at 17:41

peige said:
New cam belt in, car runs on three. They they diagnosed to injector and tried another, still wrong.. they now think ECU so suggest sending it away for diagnosis but he's also saying some corrosion on connectors so is worried it will be more. No talk of this being valves at all.

I'm thinking this is it now and to put it on gumtree and let somebody else deal with it. ECU repair will be hundred + then will it be fixed? He doesn't think a second hand ECU will work, coding being an issue, even then will it fix it. Arggg!

Try removing the ECU and cleaning up all the contacts using some contact cleaner/cotton buds (obviously disconnect the battery first). When I had my 206 it started behaving erratically including failing to rev over 2000, that sorted it out. It's also prone to getting water on the connectors due to it's placement (right next to the air inlet for the cabin filter on the top of the bonnet) which also caused similar misbehaviour for me.

The injector nearest the ECU side is prone to corrosion on the terminals due to being right underneath the washer jet on the bonnet. If the jet has been leaking then this might be what your garage was referring to with regards to corrosion.

Kaeo · 30 Jun 2017 at 18:30

Sounds like someone is playing part roulette! $$$

peige · 30 Jun 2017 at 19:37

Well I'm going to go and get it back in an hour, cleared the garage to get it in there and have a look. I can do a compression test and take a look at the ecu. No harm now really and I might just get lucky.

Gaygle · 1 Jul 2017 at 11:10

I'm surprised the garage didn't do a compression check and started messing around with moving injectors around before doing a basic diagnostic test!

Compression check should be your first port of call, then go from there. If it's got good compression then spark would probably be the next guess.

peige · 2 Jul 2017 at 20:26

I'd echo all of your questions about the compression. The car is in my garage now, I thought i'd take off the ecu and have a look as its easy to do.

Ecu

It has the smell of burnt out electronics so definitely something wrong but chicken and egg game now, why did it go? Is there something else wrong that caused it to go or is that the reason it won't run now. This is all very confusing, I wonder if the cam belt had gone at all, perhaps when they investigated they observed the tensioner was knackered and assumed it had jumped but in actual fact it hadn't.

I think now I'll send it away to be investigated, seems it can be looked at for £35. I hope they could tell me if its something that will have been caused by the car of if this is a ecu that has failed.