Tag Archives: Peugeot

Peugeot 307 indicator bulb holder replacement

Changing a headlight cluster bulb in moderns cars should be an easy process. However for some cars, it’s a long and drawn out process, sometimes involving the removal of bumper/body trim in order to gain access…as my brother-in-law with the UK’s most popular car, the Ford Focus reliably informs me.

When my wife told me her 51-Plate Peugeot 307’s left-hand indicator was flashing faster than normal, I though to myself “new bulb required”. I had a spare, so I set about extracting the old bulb in order to replace it. Accessing the passenger-side front light cluster is easy: all of the bulbs are in easy to remove holders that have two contact points “making” the connection for the bulb’s power. Annoyingly, it was one of these contact points that had mysteriously (read: poor design, noted by Peugeot, but not a free-of-charge fix) worn out. If my memory serves me, this is the second time this part has been replaced in the 3 years we’ve owned the car.

Here’s the offending part:

I decided to purchase a replacement bulb holder. We had a poor customer service experience with Evans Halshaw: they insisted that the part they sold me was the correct part, it clearly wasn’t. I paid cash for the part, when I asked for a refund I was offered a cheque (the excuse being, no cash was held on site…well, duh, how do you give customers change then?) Since I’ve started ranting, Evans Halshaw could make their Parts department a little bit more approachable: a door bell in the sales area isn’t too obvious…nor was the 15 minute wait for service all that appealing. Luckily I had another larger cheque to pay in to the bank, otherwise it would hardly have been worth paying a cheque for £3.84 in…coupled with two trips to the dealer and the waiting time.

After a little bit of DIY with some solder, the existing part refused to work. So today, I popped into our local Peugeot dealer, Hardie of Dunfermline, who had replaced the part previously. Top marks to the chap (Charlie) in the Parts department, he knew exactly what the part was and how to replace it. For the sum of £3.84 he sold me what Peugeot claim is the replacement part (it doesn’t fit “out of the bag”) and told me which bits of the new bulb holder that I had to remove in order to fit it. The replacement part is numbered 6215.46.

Comparing the two parts below, we can see that the new part has a protruding edge going clockwise from the left-hand contact point (marked with an arrow). The old part doesn’t have this protruding edge.

You may enjoy some mileage with a Stanley knife, however I didn’t. I used an old soldering iron to remove the protruding edge as can be seen below. There is a an edge between the contact points marked 1 below and a similar edge marked 2. There’s also an aligning edge marked 3: you may think that this matches the aligning edge on your old part, however it doesn’t, remove it too.

Anyway, I’ve blogged this fix because I heard both dealers come out with the phrase “oh yes, common fault…” Hopefully it has helped you with your poorly designed French car indicator problems. Given the number of hits my Audi A4 – Replacing the hazard / indicator relay blog entry gets, I should be selling indicator parts!

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,