It's time to move on

[Welly]

The 406's filter has to be the easiest ever, nice to see the design progressed enough to make it a bastard of a job

I haven't said 'nice car mate' and all that yet have I? so anyway....nice car mate! it is to be fair and a suitable, respectful, replacement to the 406.

I can imagine the torque being nice to play with and making an effortless drive. This 'ere twin-turbo set up, is one smaller than t'other so they both kinda have different duties to perform?

[Captain Jack]

Thanks Welly. Yes, it's a lovely car - I am loving it! I had to be really careful with the throttle today as it's so effortless in gaining speed. Also, trying to conserve on fuel. I am averaging 33mpg(!) in the 250 miles I've done in it.

The battery is definitely on the way out - barely turned over this morning. It has to be the original, so at least 6 years old. So will be getting that after pay day.

Played around with the radio and, after various adjustments, it sounds a lot better, especially with CDs. Nothing a JBL amp and new speakers/sub won't improve! Copied "Moby" to the internal Jukebox, but annoyingly, it doesn't display any of the CD text Might need to burn a couple of CDs with mp3's on, properly tagged, and just copy them over. Ordered a Peugeot USB box thing, so I can connect my iPod to it, but implementation of the thing looks very poor indeed.

Some pictures of the car here.

[Captain Jack]

Welp, the seller definitely knew that the heater flaps were broken The motor controlling the flap had been undone and the AV input for the radio, which normally resides in the glovebox was BEHIND it. Only today I figured out I had an aux-input after all! Sounds like he's been told it's a dash out job.. costing £2000.. but I just cut into the heater box to remove and fix the flap. A bit of a pain due to lack of space and proper tools (crap Dremel) but it's doable.

[Welly]

So, like, you've fixed these flaps/motors yourself? that's pretty impressive, what actually breaks then and what do these flaps do for a living?

[Captain Jack]

The flaps live here, behind the centre console in the heater box (driver's side shown here - view from under the steering wheel):



They are rotated by a motor to control the air temperature coming out of vents. Sadly, they are made of cheese, so the flap shaft breaks...



Fixed by lots and lots of glue/epoxy:

[Welly]

Wow! what a job

So do you not get heating when this is broken?

And you have to fashion a new cover after you 'butchered' the heater box?

[Captain Jack]

Depends on the model. I have a dual climate thing, so the driver's side is OK but passenger is blowing cold all the time.

I just put the bit I cut out back in with even more glue.

[steve_earwig]

My god that looks a fiddly pig of a job Well done CJ!

Is it me or does that "flap" look like the business end of a front-end loader

[Doggy]

Is it me or does that "flap" look like the business end of a front-end loader

Is that your subconscious mind working out a solution involving the yoyo and a snow drift, by any chance?

[steve_earwig]

If I could get a snow plough attachment for it...

Nah, it's just that shape, I was expecting it to be, you know, more flappy.

[Welly]

I'm fairly certain my Volvo Climate adjusts the temperature like this by moving a flap to increase/decrease the amount of hot air into the mixing box.

My flappage/spindleage solutions are very reliable because Ford made it

[steve_earwig]

Very reassuring

I think they all do that now, gone are the days when a valve controls the water flowing through the matrix, now the flow is constant and the heater just directs the air through it or not using one or more of these damn flaps.

[Doggy]

Yes, there was a golden age in the late 1970's, when they'd done away with prone-to-leak-or-seize water valves in favour of manually controlled flappery. Why couldn't they just leave it alone, at that point?

If we're honest we'd rather consign all this climate crap to the skip.

[Captain Jack]

I had a fun day. Went to refit everything but before gluing the side back on, I thought I would see that the motor is synced/aligned correctly with how far it should move the flaps. I was quite surprised to see that the motor tried moving well beyond the limits of the flap movement. At first I thought that the motor was shagged or something wasn't counting pulses correctly but... not so. I took off the driver's side motor, which works fine, and saw that it did the exact same thing!

So, it looks like every time a battery is reconnected (or whatever other event), the motors calibrate themselves by finding limits of how far they can move in each direction. Sounds sensible but it does it by literally forcing the flaps against their stops inside the heater box. It's THIS process that breaks the shafts. Urgh....

[steve_earwig]

It's probably doing the same thing as the 406's recirculation flap motor (and others maybe), the impulse is timed so every time you start the car or change it from one thing to t'other it reaches the end of its travel and the motor continues to try to self-destruct until it's time is up.

If we're honest we'd rather consign all this climate crap to the skip.

You'd probably think differently if you didn't live in a country where summer doesn't mean when it stops raining for a couple of days