Peugeot 205 GT
The 205’s dodgy window mechanism has Charlie gasping for air
1990 PEUGEOT 205 GT
Twenty minutes – that’s about how long I had a working driver’s door window. I’d just picked up the car, when I went over a bump on a dual carriageway and the window dropped about half way and wouldn’t come back up. I pulled over, sandwiched the glass in my hands, pulled it up and it at least stayed in place, though the winder no longer worked.
Readers who can cast their minds back to Drive-It Day, however, will remember what glorious weather we had in late April, which was also in play for CCW’s drive up to the Peak District ( CCW, 25 April). While I initially dealt with the heat by opening the passenger window and sunroof, by the time the midday sun came, it was too much and again I sandwiched the glass between my hands and lowered it half way. Of course, as soon as I hit a bump in the road, the window disappeared into the door – which is why I ended up taking the 205’s door panel off in a car park in Castleton.
Once I got back home I tried to repair things properly, at which point I discovered that the bottom of the door was full of broken glass. The dealer I bought the car from had mentioned that some of the windows had been broken following a fairly despicable act of vandalism and this window was clearly one of them. I found the window rail among the shards of glass – that’ll be why it wasn’t winding, then.
Annoyingly, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the glass to sit in the rail properly. I had repeated attempts at it in the occasional lunch hour for over a month, leading me to drive about without a door card the entire time, but I just couldn’t get it to go in the last few millimetres. Worse, it leaked in the rain.
Over a month later and my car was having some new suspension bushes fitted at Southgate Autos, so I asked them to have a look at the window, too. Clearly experience counts – they positioned the window so quickly that they didn’t even charge me!