Mazda 626 2.0 GXi
July 2009
The UK scrappage scheme was introduced on the 18th May 2009 to try and kick start the economy and get people spending big money again.
Apparently all the processes involved in manufacturing a new car, including the transportation of materials and products all over the world and the running of huge industrial plants are somehow kinder to the environment than keeping a perfectly serviceable car on the road. . .
This obviously caused one catastrophic problem for me and others like me; LOTS of GOOD second hand cars were scrapped and the ones that haven’t were being kept a hold of.
Now I know that plenty of people with cheap bangers will have benefited from trading them in and getting far more than their worth but many others have just seen it as an the easy option. Somehow people seem to have forgotten that you can negotiate with dealers and get the price down that way. So if you really wanted a new car you could always bargained the price down and then sell your old car privately and be up on the deal! But hey, that’s just me.
Many websites have made a record of ‘interesting’ cars they hear of that have been scrapped and it makes for sad reading. Countless high spec prestige and sports cars, in a lot of cases worth more than the £2000 scrappage value, have been crushed because the owners didn’t want the hassle of selling them privately.
The long and the short of this is that finding a good second hand car was now that little bit harder. Understandably when I found this Mazda advertised online I jumped at it. I called the seller who informed me there was a small dent in the top of the front wing but otherwise the car was in good condition. With the clock ticking I arranged to see the car the following day and as I walked past it to knock on their door, I’d pretty much already decided I wanted it. The sellers were a young couple with a small child who lived in a nice quiet road where the car was kept on the drive. After looking around the car and giving it a few checks I asked to look at the paperwork and things just got better. I was told it had a full service history but sadly this can mean anything from a few stamps, or a few receipts to this car; every invoice for every stamped service, every old MOT, all the handbooks and folders and the icing on the cake was a print off of the advert from when they purchased the car at 6 months old for £12,000. They’d fitted an after market head unit but still kept the original in it’s box too. I was completely sold at this point but the last thing to do was to take it on a quick test drive. Immediately I noticed the clutch was biting very low to the floor, it was still strong and no sign of slipping, just a low biting point.
I mentioned this and also pointed out the slightly worn front tyres to which they completely agreed with and immediately offered to lower the price.
As far as a car buying experiences go, this is how they should all be; Honest people, honest cars and fair prices.
On the drive home I remember thinking "If this blows up on the way home, I won't feel like they knew it was coming".
Coming from an old fashioned diesel I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of the 2.0 petrol and had forgotten the feeling of pressing the accelerator and not having to wait for a reaction. I was told that they’d not used the car very much recently so my first job was give it an Italian tune-up. The pleasant surprises kept coming as the clutch pedal felt better and better the more I drove, to the point where it was biting exactly where you’d expect.
When I got home I grabbed the camera and took my obligatory ‘new purchase’ pictures.
Normally my list of jobs is pretty long but with this car it was just the usual service, a few stone chips, scuffs on the hubcaps, a missing badge and a small bit of rust. The only place I could purchase the correct badge from was the main dealer but the car looked much better with one in place.
I re-painted all the hubcaps in Mercedes Arctic silver as it was the closest match to the original colour.
With these minor jobs done I attacked some rust on the passenger side rear arch, something I’d noticed when I bought it. After stabbing it with a screwdriver, then retrieving the screwdriver from the other side of the panel, I realised it needed welding.
In my welding section I go into more detail about how I taught myself but after some practice in the shed I tackled the arch on the car.
Again, some pictures are missing as I was too busy doing the work but the first step was cut all the rust out. Both the inner and outer skin were badly corroded but strangely only in a very concentrated area.
Sadly I don’t have any completed pictures but this was all rubbed down and painted the correct colour to finish it.
Because I had disconnected the battery before welding, the car had lost some of it’s codes. This caused a problem with the idle speed which I later found out to be a very common fault with these cars. The IAC valve gets dirty and affect the idle speed, normally over time the ECU compensates for this until it gets too dirty. What had happened to mine was the ECU was now trying to get a base reading from an already dirty valve.
It was a simple case of removing the valve (two torx screws), cleaning it and re-installing it. After a few miles the idle was back to normal again, although slightly lower than before, still within range.
Before I bought this car I spent a long time looking for an e36 328i Sport. It had to be manual, had to have the black interior, had to have the full OBC and had to be built after March 98 so as to include the correct Alusil engine block. As it turned out, this was pretty hard to find so when a nice looking 325i turned up for significantly cheaper than any Sport I'd seen, I ended up grabbing it.
Hindsight is a brilliant thing as I was turning down Sports for being too expensive, now though, at the time of creating this site, they are fetching silly money!
