Peugeot 206 CC Build

Since my climate control unit died (the fan died and was really stuck into place) and a bunch of other stuff broke, I decided to remove it (this happens later on the page).
In order to prepare it, I decided to already cut a bunch of cables and remove them to clean everything up a bit.
Please, do be more careful than I was, as I spent a good day or so trying to figure out my hazard lights because I cut them off by accident.
Due to the mid-dash also being gone (as that was the part that broke), I also have no radio head-unit and decided to also remove the radio wiring up-to the plug in the fuse-box.

The only wires that I kept were those for the hazard lights, which I rewired to the old radio control stick.
As this stick never worked for me (previous owner installed an aftermarket headunit), this felt like a good solution for now.

While this process didn’t give me much performance or anything, it just cleaned up a bit, made everything less likely to short-out and meant I didn’t have to deal with a bunch of cables when I eventually start removing the climate control unit itself.

The airfilter was replaced with a K&N 33-2813.
This didn’t give me any noticeable performance but I got it on sale for just 2 euro more than an OEM paper air-filter, so it’s not too bad.
And maybe it’ll give me some extra performance after mapping it later, who knows.

Because the interior weighs quite a lot but doesn’t do much for me personally, I’ve opted to remove most of it.
Additionally, this had the benefit of showing me some rust spots I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Sadly, I do not have pictures of removal of a lot of stuff so you’ll have to find this one out for yourself.
If you just gently pull at stuff, it should tell you where it’s being held in by more screws or bolts.
As for the removal of the carpets and a bunch of the insulation, I just carefully used a boxcutter to remove them.

For the "door handles", I just used some OMP tow straps.
I’ll cover the doors in either some "cartonfibre", polycarbonate or something else at a later date.

In order to minimize risk of running into issues later, I opted to replace my ECU prematurely.
As I did not want to have to deal with re-doing any wiring harnesses for the engine, my only two options were the Megasquirt MS3 PNP from Pirata Motor and the VEMS PNP from DP Engineering.

Due to having limited experience with engine mapping and some weird things outlined on the site of the MS3 (such as CLT sensor not working as normal), I decided to go with the VEMS system.
That way, I at least had someone relatively local to turn to for help if need be.

For the options I chose:

Installation, however, required me to remove the original bracket and zip-tie the thing to some other bracket instead.
While this is not ideal, I’ll fix it at a later date…​ Maybe…​

After playing with the VEMS for a while doing some road-tuning, I decided to bring it to DP Engineering.
Since my setup at this time is really easy to reproduce if you buy a stock EW10J4 car, you can download my VEMS config here.
It should work with any stock EW10J4, though it may require very minor tweaks here and there.

Sadly, DP-Engineering could only get 132hp out of the engine, this is probably due to wear on the block.
I might have the engine rebuilt someday but it’s fairly unlikely I will.

While doing some data logging, I noticed that my speed read out double what it should be and the gears shown were also incorrect as a result.
Luckily, this was an easy fix as I just had to go to Inputs → Speed Sensor and set the Speed sensor divider on the First Speed Sensor to 2.

It might be that I need to change the Speed sensor trigger edge but I have not yet tested it.
According to the VEMS documentation, this should be set to Rising for most cars, however, the way I’ve done it works just fine for now but I’ll experiment with it later.

TODO: Upload new VEMS Config.

While working on the car, I accidentally broke the PCV breather hose.
This is due to the plastic having become brittle over the 22 years this car has been on the road and me trying to bend it away slightly.
As a new PCV hose would cost nearly €50, I decided to instead take the plastic off the old plugs and make my own.

After I had freed the plugs, I needed to get the hosing to put it all together again.
So first, I needed to figure out the outer-diameter of the plugs (which will be the inner-diameter of the hosing).
After some measuring, this is what I got:

I then ordered some simple transparent silicone vacuum hosing.
Since there was no 7mm hosing, I instead opted for 6mm hosing.
I could have gone for some nice looking blue hosing instead but this would have doubled the price.
In the end, this costed me about 21 euro including shipping.

About 5 minutes of measuring and cutting later, we have a new PCV breather hose.

Since the VEMS doesn’t control the EGR, the valve could be removed from the car.
The original valve is quite a hefty thing coming in at about a kilogram (guesstimate, not actually weighted) so this also saved some weight.
I ordered the valve from a Polish company called Tafmet since I do not have the means of making one myself.

On Tafmet’s website, they show it that you need to place it between the original EGR valve and the engine block, however, I found that using 2 shorter bolts (I do not know the diameter nor thread pitch out of my head) and leaving the EGR off completely worked like a charm.
I just need to find out what to do with the leftover wiring connector but that’s a problem for future me.

I decided to upgrade the Exhaust Manifold to hopefully remove some restrictions, as well as increase scavenging a bit.
Instead of going for something fancy and custom, I decided to just go with the manifold of the 206 RC instead.