Cam belt change

[ajh]

Mine is 2010 and the last year without DPF I thought.

[NY]

Do you mean the last year when a DPF wasn't mandatory on a diesel? Evidently my 2008 Peugeot 308 had a DPF fitted before this became a legal requirement.

I hope when you have to have the DPF replaced, once it stops self-cleaning and you get a warning light/message, you don't have the extra cost that I did. I had budgeted for about £400 for a new DPF, but shortly after I left the car at the Pug garage I got a phone call to say that it would need a new catalytic converter as well. Not because the cat had stopped working but because the thread on a hose between cat and DPF had stripped as the engineer was undoing it, and he could neither undo it fully nor re-tighten it. That added another £500 to the bill. Given that the car was worth about £300 in that state (that's what the garage would give me for it) I had to decide whether it was worth paying more than the car was worth to get it working again. I decided to pay to have it fixed (closing my eyes while I wrote the cheque!), and it's given me many more years of service: it's now on nearly 190,000 miles and it still goes very well - bag of pull when needed, but still gave me 58 mpg on a 400-mile return journey (mostly motorway driving) a few weeks ago.

The only time it's let me down was when the output hose from the turbo to the inlet manifold came off. Then it ran like a wounded snail, hardly able to climb the slightest hill and not able to get above 40. The first time, I fixed it myself (I think a garage may have forgotten to tighten the jubilee clip after doing other work on the car), and then second time a few years later I partially fixed it but needed a new grommet between turbo and hose which cost me a mere £40. I can vouch for the fact that if a diesel has a turbo, it really *does* rely on it working ;-)

[ajh]

Well my guess is that it is a 2009 built car but first registered in

2010 and does not have a DPF, My daughter had it from new and I took it on in 2015.

My 2003 pug 206 1.4 diesel van had an exhaust catalyst but not a dpf, retired it when I retired and it was still returning 70mpg at 305k miles

[The Natural Philosopher]

yep. Had two turbo hoses go an a freelancer TDI. Clouds of black smoke and barely able to get to 60mph. Two minutes with a screwdriver in the land rover dealers car park.

[NY]

Mine didn't produce any smoke as far as I could see in the rear-view mirror. It just lost power and became jerky when increasing or decreasing the power. After the hose was fixed, the acceleration and fuel economy improved dramatically - better than before the acute problem, so I wonder if the hose had been leaking slightly for a while, even though it appeared at that stage to be properly fitted.

As regards the reliance on a turbo, it's a bit like power steering: in my experience, a car that has power steering that stops working is much harder to steer than one which doesn't have power steering in the first place, probably because you are working against the pressure of the PAS fluid and maybe because the steering geometry is different on the assumption that PAS will be there to compensate for innately heavier steering.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The sequence of events in the case of the BMW 2 litre in the TDI was first of all a slight hiss, and loss of power and fuel economy. That got worse and worse until there were clouds of black smoke and the engine warning light on and the 3" hose was split round 3/4 of its circumference...

Indeed. Most power steering vehicles do not have sufficient reduction to be steerable without it. They have steering racks instead of recirculating ball worm drive gearboxes.

I nearly crashed my XJS by switching off the engine before coming to a complete halt. The brakes stopped working and the steering locked up solid...

[Rod Speed]

NY [e-mail] wrote

It is entirely due to the steering geometry.