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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% 🙂
Thank you Julian. That’s embarrassingly generous of you.
I’ve often said that my aim has never been to re-create a concourse car by simply shoving on loads of repro parts. The car will go downhill. All i’ve tried to do is to raise it to an initial position/ standard that makes that a longer decline 🙂 I have fag-burnt carpets, dents on the sills and on the bumper and cracked leather. but i feel a car that’s nearly 60 is entitled to those battle scars and – if I may say so – looks like the historical vehicle the log book says it is.From my perspective, there are people out there quietly doing some great work on Ds. Perhaps i only come into focus because i write a blog about the journey. And maybe because i’m just an owner-driver, not a mechanic. Anyway, the proof of the pudding will be in the driving and i’m really looking forward to that.
Here’s an under-bonnet photo from September 2026, and a link to one of my posts with a video of how it was went i first went back to it in September 2014.
https://ds-restoration.blogspot.com/2018/04/resurrection_1.html
Hi
I did this job a couple of weeks ago. This parts drawing might help.
This is what you should have under each plastic light pod.
The ends of the long and short wires/ cables you can see when you take the spare wheel out, clip into the slots of the brackets under the lights. The spring in the photo (one one each pod, provide some resistance and limit to the turning motion. the actual turning is controlled by the stiff hooked rod connected to the steering relay at the rack. Possibly the rod you’re referring to? (Parts 4,5,12 and 13 in the drawing above?)
