Club Peugeot UK - The Official UK Peugeot Owner's Club

42 hours in a 104 ZL!

Silly 104 collection mission! 42 hours of fun! 104 ZL ebay find! £56! I knew that the tyres were cracked so we arranged to “pop” over to Cirencester for some nice alloys – not standard on that model but snazzy nonetheless – which is a bit of a drive in itself… We went via Coventry and the Cotswolds to keep the distance down. 5am –much coffee…and filling the Micra with all the tools in the world! – I couldn’t afford a trailer to get the car from Suffolk to Huddersfield so it would have to be driven – a bit of a crazy plan as the car hadn’t been run in a year but hey! 10am (ish) we arrived in Cirencester after a very fast drive down, then to get lost and drove around the one way system for about an hour! Curses on laptop screens in sunlight and Autoroute. Paper maps next time! We were two hours behind and quite tired by this point but in high spirits (mostly coffee high!) The plan from this point was to grab the wheels and fly to Suffolk, oh, via Hertfordshire for a piccolo which needed picking up that weekend… and collect the car in the afternoon giving us some daylight to get the 104 going before driving it and the Micra – now looking like a rally support vehicle, piled full of tiny alloy wheels with huge chunky tyres and tools – back up to near Leeds. Utter Madness!

We didn’t get to Hertford until 2.30 pm… And Suffolk (not via the M25!) by 5.30 – by which point we needed sustenance – coffee and cake in a lovely little tea shop! It made a slightly strange counterpoint to the journey so far. 6pm – we finally got to the car! It looked very tatty, and most of the interior was missing… but lo! There was a full 2 months MOT, original paperwork inc. receipts, old tax discs, old MOTs with mileage (39,000 genuine miles!) and the original handbooks/ bills of sale… the lad I brought it from had tried to use the ZL 954cc as an off-road racer hence the stripped interior and the entire field stuck underneath it! But for the most part, the floor and such appeared solid. According to his Dad (who was there to hand the car over as the son had just gone on holiday) the 104 had had one experimental outing and then been retired in favour of a more modern Nova (presumably with a bigger engine). The father turned out to be an extremely enthusiastic vintage Mercedes fan and when he realised we weren’t looking for a cheap car and had actually come to rescue a rare one, he showed us his pride and joy, and luxurious (to us!) garage converted to workshop facility. The battery was very flat and it took a while to jump start, but once it did start it sounded great! Steering seemed OK, brakes were good, oil was the right colour, coolant wasn’t foamy or overly rusty, so most of the tools went away as we left the car to warm up and tried to change the wheels, but found the nuts were a wildly different shape! So we had the problem of nasty thin cracked tyres, one constantly deflating to contend with also.

As an extra laugh, one wheel had a much larger tyre than the rest, which gave the car a distinctive “lurch” while cornering! 7pm! We were off, round the corner… to the garage for air in the tyres… which is when we realised that the battery wasn’t capable of holding a charge! – the car promptly wouldn’t start on the forecourt and had to be jump started again! This procedure was to become second nature throughout the trip home… Once we got going, she flew up the motorway (driving considerably more slowly to accommodate the older, recently re-awoken engine) without any other problems – a little on the loud side after all the time stood and the lack of seats and carpets to deaden the boom, but nothing major! Except that all the stopping and checking over car at garage had taken extra time and we were way behind our revised schedule, again. By 11pm neither myself nor Tref could carry on driving, so we stopped at Cambridge for food – thanks for the lack of 24hr service, guys! There were many other disgruntled motorists milling around, mostly getting back in their cars and driving off after complaining, but we decided to camp out for a couple of hours in their car park… what better place than the already stripped out 104 boot! Actually quite comfortable with some coats and blankets! So comfy, we ended up sleeping there for rather longer than intended! We may just have been really tired though…

So, after yet more coffee and Lucozade… we set off again. The usual procedure of jump start and re-inflating tyres and off again… By now it was apparent that the ‘nice’ covers on the front seats were there because the front seats had perished with heat leaving nasty dust everywhere. At some point a large family of spiders had taken up residence, and were none too pleased at their home being moved! As Tref was becoming more worried about the constantly discharging battery and tyre situation, it was decided that we should call in on some friends in Kettering on the way up north… Tref knew where there were car parts available on Sunday mornings there! We got there at 7am… where, true to ironic French car style… the car stalled while cornering and wouldn’t start again… which wasn’t unusual except: we discovered that after neatly coiling them up, Tref had left the jump leads in the car park in Cambridge, so we had officially Broken Down in Kettering at 7am on a Sunday morning! …oh, and we were right alongside a substation… ooh, the irony… electricity everywhere and not a spark to jump…

So, off Tref went in search of a 24 hour garage for fresh jump leads, while I was left to my mobile phone radio – as it happens the 104 got lots of attention from a kind natured half drunken student, obviously coming home from the previous night, who offered to give me a push start! (and a cup of tea?) I politely refused his kind offer! - (sadly there are no photos of the next bit cos it was quite involved …) – When Tref returned with no leads or battery we decided to push start the car – uphill, through the narrow one way system to get it the (allegedly) short distance to our friend’s house… Oddly, in this age of equality I ended up doing the pushing! This did get the car going, but only very briefly, because by this point the battery was well and truly cooked, and there was no choke cable (sorry, did I forget to mention that earlier?!) … and, well, small town, sleepy Sunday morning traffic, cold engine that wanted to stall, need I say more? We gave up and pushed it the rest of the way (although Tref was now pushing too!) We seemed to spend the day sitting around in a daze. The car parts shop opened at 10, but by the time we’d got one car around the town without power and gone back for the other, then been battery shopping it was nearly lunchtime, but we’d finally bought a new battery, which cost more than the car! It’s amazing how certain items without price stickers can attain commodity value on a Sunday to a clearly dishevelled person raving about weird old French cars and trying to buy obscure wheel nuts…

Finally we set off again at 5pm after some gratefully received dinner (thanks Nick and Sarah! – another Tref Adventure Visit!) The last leg of the journey at least didn’t leave us using the Micra as a portable battery booster for the 104 but the ever deflating tyre was still a problem.

Countless service station air lines were to become a fixture of the last leg of the journey… It took what seemed like another age to get home… The M1 has never taken so long.

A couple of weeks on, we’ve recovered and had the car inspected by an MOT tester on his ramps. He’s most surprised by the generally sound state of the undercarriage, and gave us the number of a good but inexpensive gas welding guy who he tells us will do all the welding for a song. The car has also been to see a local paint specialist, who has quoted us a ludicrously low price for the job, even using proper cellulose! Inside and out! Engine bay and everything! Some of the painters we contacted were wanting 5 times what he says he can do the car for (although this is on the understanding that he gets the 205 in later, for the same price again). Once we’re sure we can recommend him to people, we will. He seems like a very fair bloke who genuinely likes seeing out- of-the-ordinary cars being looked after and restored. After our marathon rescue journey, the gear change has begun playing up, which we haven’t investigated too closely yet, but seems like it may be the selection linkage rather than the box or synchro (phew!) and the clutch has begun making horrible noises when you touch the pedal. This may be linked to the change, or it may be a dry release bearing or something. The engine’s coming out for paint anyway, so it won’t be such a big deal to get at to inspect and rectify. The ignition is playing up a little too, but that’s easily sorted as well.