Ok, I have a question for y'all.

I have a Peugot 205, H reg, which I bought secondhand at the end of last year.

For it's age, my car is in great condition and he is extremely reliable. Except, that is, until we meet water. Every time I drive in rain & unavoidably go through a puddle, my little car shortly afterwards grinds to a halt and requires a break of about 15 - 30 minutes to dry out before I can get him going again. My last experience of this was driving late last night when he chose to stop on a motorway - not very big or clever!!

I was wondering if anyone else out there has / has had the same type of car, and does yours have a water-phobia too?

Ta, Kakeyhead.

It sounds very much like the distributor and or spark plug wires are getting drenched, thus shorting out the electric to the sparkplugs. The warm engine will evaporate the moisture after a few.
Possibly replacing the plug wires with some high quality silicon ones might help, as well as a new distributor cap. Both should be fairly inexpensive, and if it doesn't completely solve the problem it should at least reduce it.

Yup, new wires and cap sound like the most likely solution to that one.

For a short-term solution, keep a can of WD40 in the car. When it happens (of if you know it's going to get wet), spray WD40 over the wires and connections. That will displace the water, and at the very least cut out the 30 minute wait :)

Here's a super top tip !

Get a rubber glove, cut the finger ends off, feed the H.T. leads through the holes then place the glove/leads over the distributer.

The distributer will have it's own special little waterproof jacket on, and will give you miles of trouble free motoring in the rain

( this method only works with four cylinder engines for some reason )

I'm not as daft as I look you know !

I agree with all of the above, just take the distributor cap off, and give it a good spray with WD40, should help with the problem. :)

here's a pic of a 205 engine bay showing where the distributor cap is, and in the corner a pic of a distributor cap

Wow!

Thank you all! I on the other hand, AM as stupid as I look, 'specially when it comes to my car!

Ta muchly!

Kakeyhead :-)