I love doing things that conventional wisdom clealry indicates I shouldn't.
Two things happened to the bus of doom recently.
First of all, the exhaust rusted right through at a weld between the downpipe and the cat.
Cleaned it all up with the wire brush in the grinder (top tool) and fizzed it all back together with my 30 year old Clarke 160E mig and pub co2 gas.
Then the crank pulley which has been rattling mildly for some time decided I wasn't listening and started making some proper noise. Dual mass crank pulley failure is pretty much expected on the HDi engine, so it seems, and when it does fail, it makes some crazy rythms that Art Blakey couldn't hope to emulate.
Anyway, price for a new one is about fifty quid out of GSF or Euro.
But, I thought in a moment of sparklingly clear stupidity, how much give is there in this thing, how much of the vibes are actually being soaked up ? So, I whipped the pulley off, had another think about it and in similar fashion to the exhaust mentioned above, made some sparks and fizzed it up solid with the mig. So the dual mass pulley is now a single mass pulley with some slightly charred rubbery bits in the middle (although I did put the fire out by sporadically dipping it into the barrow of rainwater which I keep out the back just for such eventualities.)
So, solid crank pulley, no vibe soaking qualities whatsoever.
Has the engine shaken itself to bits ? Has the alternator / AC pump shaken exploded in a blaze of high frequency vibration induced torture ? Did I die in a ball of flames ?
Err, no.
It's smoother than it ever was, which appears to prove quite conclusively ( I would suggest) that Citroen / Peugeot et al are having, as the saying goes, a laugh.
More boring stories from the shed of cheapo repairs next week.