Today I attended to a few more minor adjustments to the DS. I plan to take the car to the French car show in mid-July which is a good deadline to complete the most outstanding items. The first was the bonnet catch cables. When the car was painted, the cables were not routed correctly. There is a channel for them to go through in...
The motor mounts were changed on the 300SE around six months ago, but there was not time to do the Transmission mount. It was obvious it would need doing from the condition of the motor mounts. In addition, I was feeling some vibration from the drivetrain at various times. changing the W126 transmission mount is generally a simple affair. The transmission is jacked up...
My Traction Avant has been missing its front carpet since my purchase. The lack of the front carpet made an otherwise nice car look like a bit of a Jalopy. The traction Avant front carpet is a single piece like the DS. As the Traction is a front engine car, it does not need a transmission tunnel. I was not able to find...
As part of my DS restoration I had already replaced one of the DS rear indicator housings. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the quality of the reproduction part. It had been suggested to me that these are actually quite easy to repair. Instead of paying good money for an inferior part, I decided to give it a go. I’ve never soldered before, and the...
I had gone as far as I could on my own with the DS. It was time to bring in the experts. I had spent a number of hours trying to get the lights to work. I made some progress, but was unable to get them to work correctly. Luckily Jason, my friendly DS mechanic was able to sort out the mess pretty...
You would think that mounting the DS window cranks would not be worthy of a full post, but there was more to it than I thought! My car had the wrong window cranks installed prior to the crash. From my research they were from a DS model produced between 1962-1964. This was an opportunity to fit the correct units while I was purchasing...
You can own a car for years and still find interesting design details that you never noticed. I’ve owned W111’s for around 10 years and today discovered for the first time that the W111 fuel filler cap door can be held open with the fuel cap. Another example is the little brackets on the DS bumper that keep the rear wings from scraping. There...
The restoration of my DS is almost complete. The DS rear bumper is now back on the car and from the outside the car looks complete. I’m really happy with how it looks. The bumper is actually quite simple to mount. In retrospect I should have removed it in one piece instead of disassembling it. It would have saved me a lot of time. ...
The rear bumper bar has been ready for fitting since February. I had not yet mounted it was one of my tail light housings was not working and I figured its easier to replace this with the bar off the car. A friend in the Citroen Club gave me a used one, which was better than what I had, but also not working. My...
Before I can get the DS back on the road, I need to sort out the front end wiring. This controls the headlights, indicators, horns etc. There is obviously something wrong here as I had been seeing strange behaviour in the lights. I spent some time on this late last year, and made only minimal progress. I had some suggestions to check the...
The windscreen washer has not been working on my 450SLC for a couple of months. The wipers started up, but no water squirted on the windscreen. On quick inspection, I assumed it was the pump as it was rather rusty. The W107 windscreen washer pump is a poor design in my view. It appears that the motor is below where the water is...
When I completed the boot lid last week, I forgot an important part. The boot lid struts! I was going through my parts box last night to mount the window cranks and noticed them. The boot struts keep the boot lid open. They are quite simple, consisting of a spring inside a tube. This means the Citroen DS boot struts do not wear out...
Today, I was reading an excellent article on Curbside Classic about the legendary Paul Bracq. Bracq had a long career with Mercedes Benz, BMW, Peugeot. He also worked at an independent styling house. Part one covers his time at Mercedes-Benz and part two the rest of his career. I highly recommend this article. Bracq was responsible for one of Mercedes-Benz most elegant designs of...
Today’s job was to work on the DS door trim. Most importantly, re-mounting the door cards. The door cards were new in 2014 and still in great shape. The grey velour goes very well with the darker shade of red. Before I mounted them, I took the opportunity to spray the inside of the doors with some fish oil and lubricate the window...
The DS is finally looking more like a car, now I have mounted the boot lid. A couple of weeks ago I prepared the boot lid for mounting. This involved adding the seal, locking hardware etc. Today, I added the top seal and then fitted it to the car. The top seal has metal clips to hold it in place. Its...
About 18 months ago, I had my E-Type upgraded from sealed beams to Halogen headlights. Last night, I took the car on the first extended night drive since the upgrade. What a difference! The Halogen upgrade also included relays and wiring directly from the battery to the lights. Before this upgrade I never felt particularly comfortable driving the car at night. With this...
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