Episode 34: The eternal quest for bounce
In a post a while back I was trying to figure out why the front suspension seemed stiff, or at least stiffer than I had believed a citroen should be. To that end the drivers side anti-roll bar ball joints were dismantled, cleaned and greased. This loosened things up but now the passenger side seemed stiffer then the driver's.
The time has now come to look at the passenger side suspension linkages. Everything was given a bath to get rid of all the accumulated grease and dirt. Now able to see what was going on, a special tool was made up to undo the ball joint retaining collars. By special tool, I mean a piece of 3mm flat aluminium bar bent into a right angle about 10mm from one end.
Undoing the collar releases the spring and ball cup so that all the old grease can be cleaned out.
The end of the special too is just visible at the top of the photo. As the workshop manual often says, reassembly is the reverse of disassembly. Some new grease pumped through the grease nipples and things were starting to improv albeit not as much as I had hoped. Although both spheres were degassed with new diaphragms in September they were now called into question. Throwing them onto a tester revealed on was holding just over 900psi while the other was down at 400psi. Aha we said, herein lies the problem. Onto the gassing rig and it was soon brought back up to 900psi, much better. This was confirmed by putting it back onto the testing rig and sure enough the gauge came up to 900psi, lovely. A quick dunk into soapy water showed no leaks so all was good to go. The spheres were dutifully spun back onto the car and the beast was coaxed into life. Despite everything, the side with the recharged sphere was still solid. In desperation a GS sphere was spun on and low and behold, both sides were now supremely floaty as they should be.
Here we have the offending article. All looks as it should be. Thinking that I may have stuffed up when assembling the damper I took it out and discovered something dd. What you can't tell from the photo is that it was much heavier than it should be and tapping it with a hammer produced a dull thud. Both bad signs.
Turning the sphere upside-down caused nearly a litre of LHM to fall out. The fill port was undone to confirm that the sphere was indeed totally flat, evidenced by a total lack of gas escaping. Spot the problem......
Somehow 900psi of nitrogen had left the building minutes after being invited in. I do have a spare front sphere and it even happens to be the right one for an EFI 21 however they need to be fitted as matched pairs. Seeing as the damper is removable on both versions I thought perhaps Citroen would be kind enough to use the same lower casting for both.
No such luck. Under the riveted damper assembly is a single hole whereas under the screwed damper there are 5 holes arranged around a central threaded one. Current plan is to swap the top halves or at the very least fill port plugs and try gassing again.
Another side project has been trying to track down an EFI139 owners manual. There is a PDF floating around the web however it is missing pages and rather fuzzy in places. Late one night a thought occurred. Why not crack open adobe InDesign and Illustrator and make one. 3 nights later and the whole thing had been retyped and the images had been straightened. Just as I was about to stock up on paper for test prints a message arrived from England. A month later this turned up in the mail. Printed in Slough for the 1970 model year only this is the very first edition of the DS21 EFI owners manual. I've only ever seen 2 come up for sale in 10 years and the usual suspects don't know it exists let alone have a copy.
If anyone out there wants a print ready PDF with crisp text and images send me a message