OUR CLASSICS
Richard’s 205 has been AWOL thanks in part to the quality of the plastic parts that Peugeot fitted. Still, what was he expecting after 30 years?
1994 PEUGEOT 205 1.1 JUNIOR
It’s been a while since I last reported on my Peugeot 205 1.1 Junior and there’s a good reason for that – it hasn’t been around enough for me to write about it. Several simple issues snowballed, with the result that the car has only just returned after several months away. And, when the temperamental Gallic terror did finally re-appear, something else – thankfully minor – promptly went wrong. Le sigh…
The problems started when I noticed that the brake pedal would occasionally randomly sink to the floor rather than apply the anchors, often after the car had been unused overnight. While pressure would immediately return, it was obvious that the brake master cylinder was on its way out. So I booked the 205 in with a local garage to have this done, something that should have been very simple but turned out to be anything but. When I dropped it off, I mentioned that it was fine to just work on it around other jobs; it wasn’t urgent because I had my other cars that I could use instead. In retrospect, this may have been a mistake.
Brake master cylinders for Peugeot 205s are plentiful. Unfortunately the plastic fluid reservoirs that plug in on top of them are far less easy to find. Now, Peugeot wasn’t best-known for the quality of its plastics in the Eighties and Nineties, something that anybody who has been inside one of the marque’s cars from that era and noticed the often grey, flaking and flimsy trim will testify to. The original fluid reservoir’s brittleness caused it to more or less disintegrate when it was removed from the old cylinder and that was when the fun and games properly began.
I could not find a replacement anywhere. There were old ones online, still attached to their master cylinders, but I was loath to buy one for fear of breaking the reservoir again when I tried to get it off. Eventually my friend Andrew came to the rescue; he was the brave soul who took my old 1987 205 1.4 GR on back in 2016 when its gearbox went bang and it’s only just returned it to the road, looking superb and driving marvellously.
Fortunately he just so hap
