Like life itself, fixing old cars can be infuriating, humbling but occasionally exhilarating.
The 1970 Citroen DS21 Pallas is sublime – when everything works. There are a thousand reasons to smile; the iconic design, groundbreaking engineering and the most comfortable leather seats anyone has ever melted into, while the car glides along the bitumen.
My DS21 ‘BVH’ is the top of the range for the times; the hydraulic system powers the famous floating suspension, but also powers the brakes, the steering and, unique to this version also the clutch. It is a manual car without a clutch pedal!
The ‘boite vitesse hydraulique’ (literally “box of gears hydraulic”= hydraulic gearbox) marketed in the USA as ‘Citromatic’ or sometimes ‘semi-automatic’, means the driver moves a wand above the steering column to manually change gears but that is all – the clutch activation is done for you.
With so much of the cars engineering depending on maintaining pressure through the hydraulic circuitry, it is mission critical that all the elements work perfectly and do not leak. The precious green hydraulic fluid – the blood – must maintain pressure as it circulates through the car’s veins.
Now that any DS is somewhere between 50 and 70 years old, just like us poorly designed humans, it is inevitable that occasionally things go wrong. Lots of things.
The tasks performed in other cars by conventional steel springs or shock absorbers are performed in a hydraulic Citroen by suspension spheres, inside of which is a diaphragm. Nitrogen on one side of the diaphragm interacts with the pressurised hydraulic fluid (LHM) on the other.
To maintain pressure and to avoid the hydraulic pump running non-stop, which invites premature failure, there is a pressure vessel called an accumulator. The pump fills the accumulator, and that feeds the rest of the system as it needs it. Simple plumbing.
On my car, over the years the nitrogen inside the sphere on the accumulator had depleted, causing the pump to run every seven seconds. In a healthy system the pump kicks in and cycles with its familiar and comforting clicks and whirrs around every 30 seconds or more. So my accumulator sphere needed to be refreshed.
Replacing spheres is not difficult – as long as they can be reached, like the ones that control the suspension for each wheel. But for some weird Gallic reasons nobody has ever been able to fathom, the accumulator on a DS is buried deep in the bowels of the engine bay.
After consulting the manuals and local Citroen gurus who hang out on www.aussiefrogs.com, I tried a short cut – to get at the accumulator from underneath the car. After a few hours I abandoned that as a stupid idea needing a hoist, which I do not have.
Instead, I bit the bullet and started throwing spanners around. First step, release pressure in the hydraulic system, then remove the coil from the inner guard mount, the fuel pump from the block, the front passenger-side suspension sphere, and multiple hydraulic lines coiled randomly around the engine bay all of which were in the way.
A radiator hose to the (empty) expansion tank was annoyingly positioned, and without really thinking I undid the clips to remove it, thus flooding the garage with coolant as the radiator emptied itself. Sigh.
Eventually I could get deep enough into the engine bay to feel the bolt heads beneath the body of the accumulator and with multiple contributions to the swear jar managed to eventually, gradually, get stubby spanners under the flange to undo the bolts and extract it.
Euphoria was closely followed by the realisation that after swapping over the dud sphere for a re-gassed one, I needed to somehow put everything back!
A few turbulent hours later, after multiple checks that everything was tight and sealing properly, and that there were none of those pesky washers or clips left over, I held my breath, started the car, watched as it hauled itself up as the system pressurised and Eureka, the pump was running every 35 seconds and there were no suspicious deposits of fluid, dripping on the garage floor!
After a quick squirt around the block, which might have resembled a victory lap were I not so pessimistic, I reassured myself that indeed the problem was solved and feeling positively superhuman, returned to tidy up my garage.
As I parked the car, I timed the pump once more – and it was cutting in after 15 seconds, not the 35 of just five minutes before. One step forward, one step backwards …
True to type and in many ways typifying my entire mechanical history. Maybe I should join the local bowls club instead.