My 406 Break - bought it for work, but already love the car

[tom84]

I had a terrible situation with an aux belt that wen tin my 1.9 td. it for no reason jumped off the pulleys when I hit a speed bump (slowly) and then got stuck in the cam belt and, because I didn't know what was going on and my mate was advising me to try things over the phone, I tried starting it and totally ruined the head. It cost 5-600 £ to fix.

I'm glad to see this forum is getting new posts as I am in need of some advice (if you don't mind me hijacking your thread, you updates are great). I want to do away with the stock fuel filter and run something much less fragile and ideally simpler. I am on my second filter housing unit which lets in air and has caused the car to die. In an emergency, I bypassed the whole thing and just installed an inline filter as a temporary fix but this has been great for nearly 2K miles. Currently, the original unit slops fuel back into itself and does nothing as I joined the 'out' line to the 'in' line. As I say, it was an emergency. I want to get rid of the whole thing but what do I do with the in and out pipes for the heat exchanger and the electrical plugs? Can I get away with an inline/sausage filter and if so which should I get and how should i mount it (horizontally/ vertitically, tilting up or down?)

[joydivision]

Thanks
Yes, once I removed the paint what I found was indeed far worse than I feared, so I'm really glad that I took care of it, otherwise one day I could very well have found myself having a convertible that's open-top for good
The repair actually doesn't look that bad, I mean, they soldered a sheet of metal in place (probably it already had reached the point of a rusty hole in the roof ) and it seems well done, also the paint layer was thick, having filler underneath and primer, but maybe they didn't take enough care with preparing the surface of that new metal sheet and therefore the whole layer of paint started to crack? Once it had all those cracks, water could come in and it would form a perfect opportunity for rust, as humidity couldn't get out anymore.

[joydivision]

I had a terrible situation with an aux belt that wen tin my 1.9 td. it for no reason jumped off the pulleys when I hit a speed bump (slowly) and then got stuck in the cam belt and, because I didn't know what was going on and my mate was advising me to try things over the phone, I tried starting it and totally ruined the head. It cost 5-600 £ to fix.

I'm glad to see this forum is getting new posts as I am in need of some advice (if you don't mind me hijacking your thread, you updates are great). I want to do away with the stock fuel filter and run something much less fragile and ideally simpler. I am on my second filter housing unit which lets in air and has caused the car to die. In an emergency, I bypassed the whole thing and just installed an inline filter as a temporary fix but this has been great for nearly 2K miles. Currently, the original unit slops fuel back into itself and does nothing as I joined the 'out' line to the 'in' line. As I say, it was an emergency. I want to get rid of the whole thing but what do I do with the in and out pipes for the heat exchanger and the electrical plugs? Can I get away with an inline/sausage filter and if so which should I get and how should i mount it (horizontally/ vertitically, tilting up or down?)

Yes, the aux belt splitting and getting caught in pulleys causing cam belt failure and subsequent major damages has been reported a couple of times, one has to be careful with this in the XUD engines.

As for what you're planning to do, I quite admire your courage to do such a (heavy?) modification to the original engine, but I understand your reasons, I myself believe that the micro air leak that my engine has and that makes fuel run back into tank over night might be in the fuel filter housing.
I suggest you open a dedicated thread for this, though, as you will have more people giving suggestions. Also it is in fact thread hijacking but I'm not upset with that I just think it will be more useful for all, if you open a separate thread for this.

[joydivision]

Haven't had time to come here lately - have had a lot of work and we've been moving to another house which we partly helped to build and all, so these last times have been crazy. Now it's a bit calmer, still a lot of work though

So, here's a little update on my 406 which has been used a lot and has been very helpful for the move just as I imagined, but lately has given me some trouble but still everything seems to be possible to solve within reasonable effort and cost, fortunately:

- At 195k I had a cooling circuit hose suddenly break, which led to loosing all cooling liquid and fortunately I noticed it soon enough so not to cause any overheating. I had to call the towing service and it was easily replaced in garage. I think that's normal to happen some time in a car with that age.

- At around 200k I noticed (again fortunately soon enough, I make it a habit to keep an eye on things with all my cars) that the rubber protection of the right CV joint was damaged and grease was coming out - took it to garage to change it ASAP. I think no damage happened to transmission, this was more than 7k kms ago.

- At 205800 kms and portuguese MOT approaching I decided to take it to the garage, because I remembered the trouble from last year with the oil leak and I thought: let's get this sorted. So I asked the mechanic to do what had to be done, but with as little cost as posssible (he's a trustworthy person, I know him for quite some time now). It was very difficult but he eventually found the cause: it was the turbo itself, was letting oil through. So he had to dismantle the whole thing to take the turbo out and send it to a specialist who reconditioned it, installing a new core and everything. That wasn't cheap at all, but still much less than a new turbo. Then he mounted it again. Within the process also discovered some minor parts needing replacement related to exhaust manifold. Overall result: turbo is now as new (just to listen to the difference in sound is really great, it now whistles so delicately while before it sounded more like a roaring lion ) and car gained a little more power. No surprises it passed MOT very well
Ah and btw he took the opportunity to clean the EGR. It was also time to change front brake pads.

- Having just spent well over 500 euros on all this, you can imagine I was really scared when just 2k kms later, while going over a speed bump, something strange happened: a metallic sound of something breaking and then the car was shaking and vibrating and making a lot of noise when accelerating. Also a tinny sound when changing gears coming from gear lever. It still drove. But I didn't risk it and called the towing service. My mechanic took a little to find it out but then it was easily (and fortunately quite cheaply) sorted: for some odd reason one of the gear box mounts had broken a piece of it, which was loose and all this against the vibration of the engine caused all that noise and vibrations. It was also close to the gear lever, explaining that strange sound.

So, all well for now, but before I forget, I have to say, once again, how great it is to have this forum, even if with little movement these days because of the age of this model, but it's a very, very valuable ressource: yesterday I had suddenly trouble with the center back seatbelt, it was totally jammed, with the back seat folded down. I had to unmount the whole 2/3 back seat and the seat belt from it's fixation point underneath the seat. Then, I researched, and yes, found the solution here on the forum, not only a guide on how to get access to the seat belt mechanism in the back seat (which would not have been necessary, but I though the mechanism was damaged) but especially the important information that the belt has a safety feature that doesn't allow it to be pulled out while back seat is not in vertical position. It turned out that the plastic thingie that's on the seat belt to prevent it from retracting too much into the housing when the back seat is folded down was worn out, so when folding down the back seat, it had retracted too much. Mechanism wasn't broken at all. So, after having it all back to normal, I made a temporary fix to that plastic thingie installing a cable tie around the belt so that it can't go back too much. Will look out for a better long term fix, though, as it doesn't look nice.

[Doggy]

Hi, great update there.
It's good to hear that your 406 is still going strong despite a few problems. They are really good cars, I miss mine so much.
Enjoy yours for as long as you can.