Citroen DS further adjustments

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 front wings. Not being in the proper place puts more pressure on the cables. I doubt it is enough to break them but it is worth routing them properly.

The next was re-fitting the spare […]

W126 Transmission Mount

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 a little, with care taken not to dent the pan. The mount is freed via three bolts – two on the crossmember with a 13mm socket and one to the tail of the transmission with a […]

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 […]