450SLC radio wiring

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work to my 450SLC lately. One of my more recent jobs has been to fix the A/C condensate leak. While I was there, I noticed that rats nest of wiring for old amplifiers, car alarms and car phones. I removed most of this, but the result was that the radio in the car was no longer working. The photo below shows just some of the old wiring I removed from the car. My task today was to investigate the 450SLC radio wiring to work out why.

The radio in the car is […]

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 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 front end wiring – part 2

My efforts in getting the wiring right at the front of the DS continue to disappoint. This time, I made a harness to test multiple wires at the same time.

This helped somewhat, but I think there may be something not hooked up right at the headlights. As my car has been fitted with relays, the headlights should both come on at the same time from the passengers side wiring. They kind of do, except one side is only on very dimly when the other side is on full. So I also need to check the actual headlight connections. […]

Citroen DS front end wiring – part 1

The Citroen DS has easily removable front wings. They can be removed in a matter of minutes for various maintenance jobs. Instead of one big plug like you would find on other cars (e.g. a Mercedes-Benz), individual bullet terminals need to be connected up for all the wiring to things like indicators, headlights, horns etc.

Turns out that when my car was painted, the labels for the wires came off. When it was re-assembled, the car was doing some really strange things. This pointed to the wires not being connected back the same way. This was further complicated by the […]

Re-routing the DS rear speaker wires

I had originally tucked the wiring for the rear speakers in the DS under the marine carpet that was on the inside of the sills. However, I am now replacing that and gluing down the correct vinyl, so wanted a better solution.

The DS wiring harness actually goes between the inner and outer sill, along with some hydraulic lines. This is not normally accessible, but I already had the stainless steel sill covers off, so it was a good time to re-wire those speakers. It is not easy to feed the wires in there, but worth it I think.

[…]