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How are you getting on with your clutch these days Ian Anderson?
I’m digging this thread up just to add to the pool of learning (or confusion?).
Having got my car on the road, I’ve tried setting up the bvh using Adie Pease’s “reverse crunch” method: as the reverse gear has no synchromesh, you put the car in reverse gear and if there is a ‘crunch’ it means the clutch is dragging. You gradually wind the adjuster nut in (tighten it) until there is no crunch when you put the car in reverse and that is the correct setting point…..
As i wrote in an earlier post here, with a new clutch pressure plate and friction plate from Citroen Classics my nut is now fully wound in and i’m still getting a slight ‘crunch’. i’ve run out of adjustment. The car drives, but i know it’s not quite right. These days Citroen Classics say their friction plates are (the correct) 8mm thick. I don’t know if they said that when i bought mine a couple of years ago. Doesn’t mean they weren’t and I assume the one i was sold was fit for purpose.
A friend in the US said that when he rebuilds engines/ clutches, he now puts a washer behind the fulcrum of the clutch fork. He says this buys a few extra mms of adjustment on the clutch. As my engine is back in the car now, this doesn’t feel like an option but i had a similar idea. The clutch push rod (between the clutch cylinder and adjuster) on a ‘standard’ Ds is 80mm long. BUT, on an efi car it’s 90mm long. If i fit a longer push rod, then the extra length will mean that I’ll have more adjuster sticking out the back of the fork and more scope to wind it in.
if i use the full 90mm rod, there is a danger that the hex of the adjuster starts to rub on the gaiter of the steering rack. I would also want to be sure that when there is no pressure in the cylinder, the longer rod doesn’t prevent the clutch fork travelling fully as it should (though the notional distance between cylinder and fork will be about the same – it’s just that it will be made up of more push rod and less adjuster).
I happen to have two bvh gearboxes from vehicles unknown under sheeting behind the shed at the end of the garden. The first rod i pulled out was of course 80mm, but the second was 90mm 🙂
I’m minded to try the full 90mm rod to start with, and if that creates complications with the rack, then maybe cut it down by a few mms and then by a further few mms if problems remain. If i ended up with an 83mm rod, it would be no worse than the washer trick. It’s tight behind the radiator, but I *think* it’s relatively simple to pull out a rod and slip another in.
Ultimately of course, this will be a work-around and doesn’t explain why my new clutch has no more adjustment. As the clutch wears, i’d expect to have to turn the nut out, but that shouldn’t be for quite a while. I’m not the only one to experience this issue (see other messages in this thread from Ian) and there could be several reasons for it, including badly (re) machined parts, too thick plate.
Back in the 80s and early 90s Ds were dirt cheap. I wonder if 60s Ds (of which we agree there was a majority) were seen as very dated and more readily scrapped – especially if they were LHS, with the earlier nose and had changed hands a few times. Whereas the cars bought in the 70s were possibly still in original ownership and of ‘recent memory’ so not scrapped so readily? When the interest in Ds picked up in the 90s, the cars you saw around you were the 70s survivors.
More personally, the story, as I was told it, was that my car (a 1968 LHM, wavey dash Pallas car) was the payment for two UK Club members (Dominic Raffo (RIP) and Geoff Rothon) going to France to re-plumb an LHS car to LHM in 1993. I’m not sure if it was an ex-pat living abroad. I’ll have to ask Geoff.
Geoff drove the car for a year before Dominic took ownership. I bought it off Dominic in 1995 for £1500. For a brief moment in time I owned two Ds. Both lived on the street. Here is a picture from summer 1995. Soon after I sold the black 1969 ID. I’m once again driving the gris palladium DS21 🙂
The final bits of trim are back on the car and it’s about as ‘together’ as it can be. I’m now test driving and working through an autumn snag list.
When i put the dashboard in i found that the red hydraulic pressure warning light on the dash only worked intermittently. eventually it completely packed up.The light is negatively earthed. it’s controlled by a hydraulic switch down at the brake mushroom that breaks the lights path to earth when the car reaches a certain pressure. I traced the circuit and confirmed my suspicion that the switch wasn’t closing and making a circuit. Dirty contacts the suspected cause.
I took the switch off the car yesterday. It’s part of the mushroom brake assembly.
It’s a calibrated and (then) sealed unit.
Not my photo but inside it looks like this. A simple screw pin that makes contact with the curved hydraulic pipe. As the pressure rises, the pipe straightens very slightly and contact is broken.
My cover is still sealed on. By a combination of flushing with switch cleaner and compressed air i got it going again. I’m lucky enough to have a Citroen hydraulic test bench so took the opportunity to follow Operation D.453-0 and check the unit out.
VERY much to my surprise, i found the light cut out when pressure reached 23 bar. it’s meant to cut in/ out at between 60 and 70 bar! So if pressure drops to 60, your warning light comes on. mine won’t come on until it’s down to 23 bar! that’s way out of whack!
Citroen do NOT give instructions for recalibrating (though with pressure gauges it’s easy enough to do accurately) probably as it’s a safety device. Hence the wire seal. At least mine provides some kind of warning. I put the switch back on the car so i could continue road testing and the bloody thing isn’t working again! It looks like i will have to pull it off again at some point, break the seal and give it a good clean up. That alone might make it register within the correct range. if not, i can use my test bench to recalibrate it. But I’d still like a spare which – when tested – already worked in the correct range.
Today I spent the morning bleeding the brakes and am off for another test drive.
Hi Paul
Can you shed a little more light on how you converted the lamps from white to yellow – pun intended.
This is something I would be interested in doing myself.Hi Colin
As you know – but others may not – this relates to the smaller long range/ swivelling lights on a DS. First thing to say is that my lights are Cibies. I’ve got a pair of Marchal yellow domes and they fit in the Marchal reflectors in exactly the same way. I haven’t tested to see if they would fit a Cibie reflector. you can buy yellow H1s that fit straight into a standard light unit, which saves all this messing about but i wanted to use yellow glass domes as originally fitted to my car.
This is how I went about it.the bulb mounts are pressed into the back end of the reflector. I removed the plain mount for the H1 bulbs, and replaced them with mounts that have yellow glass domes over them (that i already had on my old rusted lights). That way, you still just fit a white H1 bulb but get yellow light.
The bulb mount has a tab that locates in a slot around the edge of the reflector body – that is to correctly orientate the rotational position of the mount (and so H1 bulb) relative to the reflector.
To stop the mount pulling out of the back of the reflector, the factory press three or four small sharp ‘dinks’ in around the circumference of the mount/ reflector join. These essentially pin the two together using their own metal. With a combination of tab and dinks, they cant twist and they won’t fall out.
To get the old mounts out, i used needle nose pliers with very pinched ends that came to a tip to compress and so loosen the dinks. it’s barely effective but works well enough to loosen the grip so that you can then wiggle the mount straight out of the back of the reflector. I found that getting a thin blade in the gap between reflector and mount helped to lever them out a little and break the grip of the dinks.
With the old mount removed, the yellow dome mount just pushed on/ in: I lined up the tab with the slot, put it mount side down and tn gently pressed down on the reflector glass to push the mount home and there was enough grip left in the dinks to hold the mount in the reflector.
The real challenge is finding the yellow domes in the first place. The yellow glass is as thin as the glass on a bulb. One of my yellow glasses was cracked and i bought several tatty Cibie lights off Facebook simply because i could see they had the yellow domes on them. Even then, there is a risk of finding the glass is cracked. they sometimes pop up on the sasses site, otherwise someone like Mark Rueneuf is a better bet but even he rarely has them.
When seen on the front of the car, the yellow bulb holders make the car look 6.2% ‘more French’ but probably reduce the effectiveness of the lights by 6.3% 🙂
