Of axles, French mechanics, and Pope-mobiles.

The BBQ Pit
1

OK, I’m back home. Finally. See, I’ve been on a little ski trip to the French Alps (I normally just call them “Alps”, but Winkelried gets his knickers in a twist if I don’t specify the country the bloody hills are in).

“Woo!”, you say, “Coldfire’s been enjoying a nice holiday in the snow, with Europe’s Rich & Famous, frolicking about on the slopes at day, and livin’ it up in the bars at night!”

Well, yeah, kinda. Except that it was way too warm, so the snow took on the concistency of luke-warm porridge after lunch. That means you have to work hard, and as we all know, working hard is not something you want to do on a holiday.
Also, instead of the Rich and Famous, the slopes were crowded by the Tacky and Stupid. I’m telling you, I’ll praise the day they double the prices of the apartments and ski passes, so that skiing will be a sport for the elite once again. :wink:

But I digress. For this rant is not about melting snow or dumb snowboarders.

This rant is about voitures. In particular, mine.

Please allow me to introduce my car: the Peugeot 306. Nice hatchback, corners well, great chairs. Sure, the 1400 CC engine does tend to be a bit of a slug - especially in mountains and with a heavy load - but hey, we’re on holiday, so who’s hurrying?

[sub]Everyone behind me is hurrying, based on a quick look in of my rear view mirror. But I digress.[/sub]

Strap one of these coffins onto the roof, and you’ve got yourself a nice, comfortable and reliable transport for three people, two snowboards, a pair of skis, three pair of boots, three weekend bags of clothes, and a stack of CD’s.

Off we go!

It all went fine until I had to brake really, really hard for a traffic jam in formation around Albertville. I stopped well in time, but all of a sudden, there was this horrific smell. Two seconds later, I saw a blueish, thick smoke appear from out of my right front wheel arch.

“Fuck”, I eloquently uttered. I steered the car onto the emergency lane. Sure enough, it looked like the damn brake disc was on fire or something. Upon inspection, it wasn’t: there was just smoke. A fried brake pad?

Not taking any chances with the Alps just ahead, we went off the Péage in search of a reputable garage.

Did I mention it was Saturday afternoon, 16:00 hours, and we’re in France?

After about an hour, we find a Citroën garage that’s still open for business (Peugeot and Citroën are part of the same holding, so that’s good. A lot of models share parts, et cetera). A close inspection by a man henceforth known as Monsieur Fucknugget, Méchanicien Extraordinaire, reveals that the rubber thingie around my right front axle has a small crack in it. The axle is thusly leaking grease onto the brake disc. Said oil will go up in smoke when the brake disc gets hot: like when I had to brake hard for the traffic jam. “No problem”, Monsieur Fucknugget assures me, “Your brakes are fine, you just need to replace the rubber thingie around your axle when you get back to Holland. Won’t cost you more than 30 Euro”. (Emphasis added.)

[sub]Of course he didn’t say “rubber thingie”, but bear in mind that my French is better suited to ordering large beers than repairing cars, OK?[/sub]

So, off we went, spiraling our way up the mountains to Les Ménuires.

A week of skiing and other fun stuff passes, during which the aforementioned Peugeot sits idly in a parking lot.

Saturday already! Time to pack our stuff, and head for the Low Lands.

Right?

Nope. Long story short: the rigth front axle increasingly produced noise, and when trying to back out of a parking space at a Shell station in Luxemburg (cheap gas!), it locked up altogether.

After a 30 minute wait, the local Dépannage came to the same conclusion as me: “Your front right axle is fucked”. But not to worry: I was to be towed to their garage not 5 clicks away, where a new axle would be installed.

Well, the bastards told the truth about towing me to their garage, at least. But the right axle was nowhere to be found.

Did I mention that it was -again- Saturday afternoon, and we were in Luxemburg - a country that has 10 garages, tops?

After trying three different axles, meanwhile asking such brilliant questions as “This is a diesel, right?” (hey, you put it on the work bridge an hour ago. Did it sound like a fucking diesel?), the boss of the establishment came to me and told me I could pick up my car. On Tuesday.

But hey, no fear! Bossman also had a replacement car for me.

Behold the Pope-mobile

A Renault Kangoo. Yikes, not exactly a babe magnet. :wink:
Oh well, it had a nice turbo diesel engine, and as long as winds did not exceed 4 Beaufort, it was relatively easy to drive…

So, I had the fortune of having to take yesterday off to drive 950 fucking kilometers to pick up my car in Howald, Luxem-friggin’-burg. I left Amsterdam at 9:45 AM, and found a parking spot again at 0:30 AM the next morning. Argh.

The cost of the tow, the axle, the labour, and the replacement Pope-mobile?

SEVEN HUNDRED EUROS.

And that’s excluding the diesel I burned, the day off I had to take, and the two years this whole ordeal has taken off my life.

So, Monsieur Fucknugget, wherever you are: I hope you choke on 20 liters of axle grease. Both my garage AND the importship of Peugeot in the Netherlands assured me that it is standard procedure to immediately replace an axle rubber at the slightest sign of wear or damage. You should NEVER have allowed that car back on the road without replacing the rubber cap - a job which would have taken all of 10 minutes, and which would have indeed costed all of 30 Euros.

Assclown.

2

Damn, Coldie, that sux. But don’t you guys have, like, the world’s most unbelievable rail system, or something? To this rail-deprived Canuck, it sounds sort of like a guy complaining about the quality of the soda pop at Maxim’s.

3

Heh. When I saw matt_mcl replied, I thought: “Either he’s correcting my French, or he’s gonna advise me to buy a metro pass. If it’s the former, I’ll let him live”. :smiley:

Yeah, we have great trains, but if you split the costs among three people, my car is still cheaper than three train tickets to the French Alps. Plus more convenient, and quicker.

Of course, if the TGV derails, the SNCF picks up the tab for any broken axles. Oh well.

4

That’ll learn 'ya to come to France!

I enjoyed that story, immensely! Thank you. <snicker, snicker>

[sub]says she who just had a repair problem on her Peugot, but it cost 76 Euros to tow and 30 Euros to fix [/sub]

5

What sounds like a torn CV Boot, replaced for just 30 Euros?

Oh man…there’s no way in Hell.

It’s nice that:

… but it’s simply not true, at all. As an ex-mechanic and an engineer, I can assure you that your CV joints are designed to go quite some time with holes, cracks, and small tears in them. In fact, nearly every car on the road with CV boots and more than 80,000 miles most likely has at least one boot that needs replacing, if not both. Yes, ideally, you should replace them at once, but it does not become a safety hazard, IME, until driven for thousands of miles with a complete failure of the boot.

I wouldn’t blame M. Fucknugget so much, Coldie. If the boot was not damaged that badly (you described it as a “small crack”), you should have been able to drive it for months without locking up. I would have given you the exact same recommendation, which was, replace it when you get home.

But I would have expected parts and labor for a CV boot to be about 150 euro or so - not 30. Great goddess, the part alone is about 30 euro, let alone the labor.

6

I’m talking about this stoopid piece of rubber.

My garage and the Peugeot importship said that with a crack in it, the grease will fly out due to the revs of the wheel (quite a lot when you’re doing 150 km/h), and that the grease will mix with water, dirt, snow, whatnot: causing friction and/or no lubrication at all, resulting in an axle that starts locking up.

How much labour can be involved? I saw them take off the wheel (2 minutes), and loosen the brake disc (1 minute)). The rubber can then be taken off and replaced. I’d be surprised if a repair like that would take longer than 15 minutes.

The Citroën guy just couldn’t be bothered with a small (non-lucrative) repair and wanted to go home or something.

7

So where was you, coldie?

8

That’s a CV Boot exactly. The CV stands for “Constant Velocity (joint)”.

And while technically speaking your garage is correct, so am I. A small crack is nothing to worry about, although you should replace it when you have an opportunity. And while the revs may be high, the grease in the boot is fairly viscous, and since the radius of the joint is small, there’s not a lot of angular momentum to throw it all out.

Like I said - I seen hundreds of cars driving with cracks, tears, and even boots completely gone :eek: . If I were the mechanic, I still would have said go ahead and wait, unless you wanted it done then. But mind you, I am going from your description of it being a “small crack”. If we are talking about a crack that is less than about 90 degrees around the boot, then I would have pumped some new lube up in there for good measure, and waited till I got home to do it myself (personally speaking) or have the dealer do it.

Also - if it wasn’t much labor, then he could have probaby talked it up to being 100-200 euro, and been happy to charge you for the quick job. A tourist passing through is always easy game.

Your joints much be like FIAT joints then, where you can take each one off of the halfshaft without pulling the whole halfshaft. Most Japanese cars, you have to pull the whole freaking halfshatf out of the transaxle, after draining the case, and work on it on a bench.

9

While I feel bad for you, you can really only blame yourself. After all, you were driving a piece of shit Peugeot. What did you expect?

Look at that big fucking hunk of galvanized rubber! They put that under the car where it gets beat on by roadsalt, water and debris, and it’s supposed to keep the grease on your axle?

It’s amazing they last a hundred miles.

What kind of nitwit, shit-for-brains, sloppy-assed, incompetant boob of an engineer designed that?

A Peugeot engineer, that’s who.

10

You don’t like peugeot, you don’t like mercs - jeez, what sort of cars do you like?

11

I still like Mercs. They don’t seem to like me.

I want a fucking Porsche and a Chevy Avalanche.

12

Actually, the image I used was from a website of a cardealer in Clinton, Iowa. I don’t think that car’s a Peugeot. :slight_smile:

Anthracite: the crack was about 60 degrees of a full circles when the mechanic discovered it. But the inside of the wheel and the wheel arch showed copious amounts of grease. Seems to me that’s a hint right there as well.

The half-axle system is on my car too, but I couldn’t tell you for sure if the CV boot can be taken off while it’s on the car. It just seemed that way to me, because the boot is right at the end of the axle when the wheel and brake are disconnected. Maybe I’m wrong there.

13

Oh, Gary: I was in the Trois Vallées area, in Les Ménuires.

14

Hell, I was in Courchevel. You should have called…or something.

15

You know, that’d be a great name for a porsche. The Porsche Fucking.

Manufacturers should just stop being coy about cars as sex symbols, and really emphasise it. The Lamborghini Screw - I’d buy that, I really would.

16

I think there would be a real market for the Ford Date Rape.

17

Don’t know, the connotations could be a real marketing nightmare.

But maybe someday people will forgive Ford for the whole Firestone thing.

18

Scylla, CV boots are a standard part of modern FWD automotive design. And they’re “vulcanized.” “Galvanize” is what you do to steel when you coat it with zinc to fight off corrosion. That is, if they’re even rubber. They’re prolly made out of some kind of vinyl or neoprene.

The CV boots on my good ol’ Murkin cars (Ford Taurus, Mercury Sable and Dodge Caravan) have lasted upwards of 80,000 miles with no trouble. When they showed signs of excessive wear or cracks, they were replaced. No big deal and they never left me stranded.

Here, Coldfire gets a lil’ old crack in one of the boots on his Pew-gee-hot and his axle is toast in the space of a day or so. 'Course, the front end of Coldie’s car was probably designed by the guy who came over to Peugot/Citroen after he finished designing the pourous heater core/hot Prestone footbath that passed for a climate control on the Franco-American Motors Alliance.

Just goes to show you how Amurrican automotive quality has improved over the past couple of decades. . .the rivetheads have moved in from ten feet to five feet when they throw parts at the assembly line. :wink:

NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED: No ethnic/socioeconomic slam was meant toward auto workers or to Gallic cheese-eatin’ surrender monkeys in general. However, the writer is firmly convinced that Peugots are the Official Staff Cars in Hell, Satan drives a Citroen, and Satan’s wife probably gets around in a Renault.
Zap!

19

HA!

You must be pretty dumb if you think logic or reason is going to get me to change my stance!

Coldie:

Yeah, I’m sure you did get that picture off an American garage’s website. He 'prolly just put it up there to point out the inferiority of foreign automotives.

Zappo:

Galvanize, vulcanize, don’t be gettin’ all technical with me 'kay?

Especially as you’ve proved that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Everybody knows that American cars only come in two varieties.

  1. Rear wheel Drive car

  2. Four wheel drive pickup.

all the rest of that shit was made in Mexico or with foreign parts.

Any real patriot can take a look at that CV boot and tell you that it’s some left-wing pinko foreign design.

20

FTR, CV boots are about the best option for doing what they do on a transaxle-equipped car. They do the job efficiently, with very little to no noise, little heat, and are pretty strong overall.

All I was trying to say Coldie, by butting in here, is that given the situation, he might have just been making a judgement call that went wrong. If I knew someone was possibly wary about having their car worked on by someone other than the dealer, or thought that it wasn’t that serious, I might have advised them to “wait until they get home” too. That’s all. I understand how frustrating and hair-pulling the whole situation was, and I was just being over-technical here. I apologize.