Driving a car from the 50’s often means impatient drives roaring around you when you set off from traffic lights, especially uphill. Sydney drivers are particularly bad for this. Traction Avants, as with most 50’s cars are only fitted with a small interior rear-view mirror and no outside mirror. This makes parking and lane changing a challenge. I had seen many tractions...
Every classic car community has an issue that polarizes opinion and spawns countless threads on Internet discussion boards. For the Citroen DS, that issue is what is the right tyre for the DS? Michelin were the owners of Citroen during the entire production run of the DS. During that time they pioneered the radial tyre, which was introduced in 1949. The Radial was...
The regular Shannons auctions are always a great way to see an interesting collection of classic cars and know what they actually sell for. Many classics languish for months (and sometimes years!) on carsales.com.au with ridiculous asking prices, whereas with Shannons you know the actual sale price, not the inflated asking price. There were two cars in particular I was interested in seeing...
My 250SE Cabriolet was produced 50 years ago today, or at least I presume it was, since it has this date noted on the data card, and the first service was December 1965. The Original owner was the Australian Diplomat Brian C Hill, who collected the car from the factory and apparently took it with him to various diplomatic postings around the...
My 250SE was sporting the stacked style of headlights, which are quite popular on these models. Personally, I prefer the original type. I had some original lights, but needed to restore them before they could be fitted to the car. The wear parts of the headlights are the reflectors that dull and rust over time, the gaskets that crumble (as can be...
In October 1955, Citroen unveiled one of the most innovative cars ever designed. There have been plenty of new cars that have introduced a new technology, or even a couple, but the DS was so radical that it immediately made everything else on the market seem old fashioned. And this was just the looks. Under the covers, the car contained a revolutionary...
I was down at the RMS today, putting my Traction on the new trial for a logbook style registration scheme in NSW. I really had been dreading putting the traction on the old historic scheme, but with so many cars I just couldn’t justify them all on full rego, despite how bad the old scheme was. Under the new rules, you get to...
The headlights on the W108, W109, W111 and W112 Mercedes are all interchangeable, which means many cars are no longer sporting the headlights they left the factory with. They are all based on a design introduced on the 300SL roadster in 1957. The W113, W114/5 and W100 all had similar designs based on this same theme, but those lights will not...
On the 17th of September, 1965, my E-Type rolled out of the factory in Coventry, and was dispatched on the 5th of October to Fayetteville North Carolina. The first owner, was Spencer Augustus Folsom, Jr. It shows how far car technology had come in the preceding 50 years, in that when this car was manufactured, a 50 year old car was a horseless carriage, yet...
The indicator lenses on my DS were all cracked, and the backing was in poor condition. I purchased a replacement set online, which look a whole lot better. I went to do the swap over today, but for whatever reason, the new indicators cannot simply plug into the factory wiring harness, they have spade terminals when the car uses bullets. Its not that...
Today was the annual Mercedes Club concours and while it threatened to rain all day, the weather held off and a nice variety of cars showed up, including a gaggle of 190SLs, four 600s including a 4 door pullman and a decent number of cars from the ACT. With all those 600s, I expected to see a dictator with a chest full of...
I don’t normally post about routine things such as oil changes, but in this case, there is an aspect to the oil change that is not obvious and is worth mentioning. In general, the DS oil change is well covered on the Internet, as are the warnings to ensure the filter housing is properly aligned when inserted back into the sump. The DS...
This year I took the 250SE down to the 2015 ACT German Car show, which I last attended in 2013. It was a lovely day to drive a convertible down to Canberra and as usual the 250SE performed very well. At freeway speeds the engine turns at 4,000 RPM, which is unusual for a modern car, but fits into the nature of the engine....
After restoring the 250SE to the correct wheel trims, the next step is to fit the correct headlights. The car is currently fitted with the stacked headlights. These are often known as Americana headlights. They are actually different to the USA style as they use halogens not sealed beams. This style was a common extra on the V8 W111’s and later a popular...
After becoming cynical from the normal spin and lobby group driven policy from Governments, I was very happy to see two very commonsense announcements from NSW Government minister Duncan Gay today. A trial for improvements to the NSW Conditional Registration scheme (Club Rego) A study to investigate higher speed limits on sections of the Hume and Pacific Highways The trial for improvements to NSW...
In this world of monster 4 wheel drives with inattentive drivers at the wheel, a horn is an important feature of a small, low sports car. However, the horns on my E-Type had not been working. I had previously checked the actual horn units on a 12v battery and got a very feeble croak out of them, so since they looked rather rusty, replaced...
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