Traction Avant Front Carpet

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 one that would match my car.

My original aim was to find a front carpet that would match the rest of the carpet in the car. I tried a bunch of places in Australia and I wasn’t […]

Citroen DS rear indicator repair

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 repair entails soldering the live wire back to the housing. I found a rusty old soldering iron in a box of old tools under my house and managed to get the job done. The solder was […]

Citroen DS front end wiring – part 4

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 quickly. Turns out there were multiple problems all contributing to the strange results I was seeing. People criticise British car wiring, but French DS wiring is no better.

Firstly there were some bad connectors that needed replacing. […]

Citroen DS window cranks

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 parts.

Something as simple as this turned into a much more involved project. Firstly the window cranks I purchased were not much good to me. They did not come with all the parts I needed to […]

Mounting the DS rear bumper

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 two bumper irons are bolted to the body with big rubber isolators to provide a small amount of ‘give’. What I find odd is that the nuts are really narrow. You need a 26mm […]

Citroen DS Tail light

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 next option was to purchase a reproduction part. The quality of reproduction parts for the DS can be quite spotty, so I was interested to see what the reproduction DS tail light assembly would be like.

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Citroen DS front end wiring – part 3

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 grounds. At the time I cleaned them and while they did look dirty it did not seem to make much difference.

To test properly, I bought a proper test light. This did allow me to more easily […]

Citroen DS boot struts

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 like gas struts used in modern cars.

They are quite easy to fit, just two bolts per side. These are the same bolts that hold the boot lid to the hinge. The spring tension keeps the […]

DS Door trim after paint

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 mechanism.

I also decided to fit new moisture barriers. The previous ones were not in good shape and new set was not expensive. Unlike in other cars, the moisture barrier is one one big sheet, but small […]

Mounting the DS boot lid

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 much easier to add the seal with the metal clips attached rather than trying to remove them.

The first task was to attach the hinges to the boot lid. There are four bolts and some rubber gaskets between the […]