Rear axle repair start

The end plate of rear anti-roll bar (ARB) had become loose. This is how it looked underneath

Bad, very bad.... Clearly the outer seal hadn't kept the water out for some time. Not long time after that there was play in the suspension arm that was coming from the axle bearing housing... Game over. The feared axle repair was in order. Luckily at that time I already had a small heated garage as winter was coming. I bought another cheap car for the winter and decided to keep rallye in garage for the whole winter.

Look from the underneath

The axle itself is easy to remove as it is kept in place with only 4 bolts, I struggled with brake pipe nipples and eventially ended up just cutting the pipes. Hand brake cables were stuck in the rear brake levers, too. After the axle is out of car the fun begins - the removal of the torsion bars! I made a tool for that from a old torsion bar

This is how I hit the first bar out of axle

The other end was hit from above

A washer was used between the torsion bar and tool to prevent damaging the torsion bar end. Washer looked quite damaged afterwards.

The needle bearings had eaten longitunal grooves

to the stub pin, by the process called false brinelling or fretting. Water quickens the process, but I think all peugeot torsion bar suspensions suffer this sooner or later if not lubricated on a regular basis.


The center beam could have been repaired by changing the stub pins for new ones, there exists some shops that sell them, for example this. Changing the pins seemed too much of a trouble, so I looked for a second hand axle. Actually I ended having two spare axles, one from a '93 106 and one from a '00 saxo. I disassembled both of them to see the condition of stub pins. Both were ok, kept the newer axle and sold the older. There seems to be  demand for spare axles by the way, I received several calls even months later for the one I had for sale.


I wanted to have the beam cleaned before assembly, so called to a firm that do sand blasting and powder coating. The quote was quite reasonable. However, as I had time and curiosity for anything new, I ended up trying electrolysis. The longitunal cast iron arms were in thick rust, but not after the electrolysis bath

After zinc paint

Also tried to recondition the break pressure regulator, but couldn't have it working. The other regulator valve was so stuck that it couldn't loosen it properly. Bought a new regulator from ebay (GB), I think it cost about 20e. It was for AX and had different size pipe nipple holes but that was not a problem as I needed new brake pipes anyway.