The car was seven years old, so I had no intention of buying it. But I went to see the vendor, frankly just to have a drive and expand my knowledge of the ‘D’. That drive in an ‘old’ car was a revelation. It was so much smoother and quieter than the newer cars I had tried; perhaps because it was the Pallas version. It looked magnificent. It had been owned by one family since new and had a warranted 45,000 miles on the clock. I bought it on the spot for £450.
My kids named the car “Snoopy” and the whole family soon fell in love with her. I ran Snoopy as a company car in my fledgling business for 3 years and she never let me down. In that 3 years the business had prospered and my Accountant was nagging that I should buy a new car every year, to reduce the profits. But Snoopy was now one of the family and it was unthinkable that I should get rid of her. So I had her repainted using modern acrylics in my favourite Railway livery - a chocolate brown body with a cream roof and kept her as a second car. A month or so after this paint job I had terrible feelings of guilt, that I had repainted the best designed car in the world, in non original colours. I vowed then, that someday, I would restore her back to original condition.
Sometime in 1986 we moved house and I converted the attached garage into living accommodation. This move coincided with my wife crunching the o/s rear door badly (the sill was pushed in) and so I threw a tarpaulin over Snoopy and she sat undisturbed in the open until about 1990. When I did uncover the car, it was not a pleasant sight. Condensate had formed under the tarpaulin and there was visible rust everywhere. Even the paint on the roof had blistered. With hindsight, the car would have been better off left uncovered.
By that time we had moved again and I now had lots of garage space, so Snoopy was pushed into a garage and again left. It was not until July 1993 after I had built a large barn workshop, that I was in a position to restore the car back to her former glory. I decided on a total rebuild, to take the car back to the original cellulose colour (Vert Jura) and to keep her totally original. It would be another seven full years before her wheels turned again! I would add that by this time, I had rebuilt a Jaguar e type and had learnt MIG welding, bodywork and paint spraying; all by trial and error.
In my opinion, the fatal mistake made by many amateur restorers, is to completely dismantle the car in one go. One is then faced with a mountain of bits to get lost and the size of the task becomes all too apparent!
I started the restoration by removing the four wings, the undershields, inner wing splashguards, the valance under the front of the car, the engine undertray, the bonnet and the boot lid. All these panels were safely stored away. Removing these panels meant removing many M5 bolts. These M5 (8mm spanner) bolts appear everywhere on the DS and there must be over 100 of them. The problem is, that no unrestored DS is going to have all of them still usable. Some will have badly rusted, others fallen out and some inevitably will have stripped threads. This is the point that you will discover the downside to unfettered creative freedom, on the part of the gifted engineers who designed the DS. For these M5 bolts were made by Citroën themselves and they chose to use a very non-standard thread pitch. M5 standard metric fine pitch is .8 - but Citroën used a non-standard thread gauge of .75 which, short of making them to order on a lathe, you will not be able to source.
To get around this problem, I re-tapped every one of these threaded holes on the car to M5 fine and replaced all the bolts with stainless steel versions. These bolts are not as pretty as the Citroën version with its cast chevrons on the bolt heads, but at least I know my fastenings throughout the car are never going to rust again.
I then removed the 4 doors; DS doors are easy to remove, as they are hung on pins - on the same principle as a 5 bar farm gate. Do not touch the top fitting; slacken the holding nut on the bottom fitting, which will then allow you to unscrew the pin that locates in the cup and forms the hinge. If there is no metal replacement to be carried out on the doors and you have not disturbed the top hinge unit, then rehanging the door and tightening the bottom pin until there is no up and down play in the door, will retain the original door fixing position.
Important: After replacing or adjusting door hinges, wind the window glass right up and very slowly close the door, observing that the glass is not fouling the roof gutter; more on this, later.
I then removed the 8 door hinge units from the body frame, ensuring that I noted the number and thickness of the metal shims that fit under the hinge units and which can be different for every car.
I then tackled the doors; starting with the o/s front door. I stripped this right down to a bare shell. Stripping the door is fairly straight forward until you try to remove the glass from the door. This is how you do it:
- Remove the window crank by pushing out the pin which is accessible by pressing the escutcheon on the crank towards the door panel. Then bend the two metal tabs at the front and rear of the door panel away from the door (early cars do not have these tabs).
- Carefully snap out the clips holding the trim panel to the door, by prising with a screwdriver and remove the panel. Peel back the three plastic sheets which allow access to the inside of the door. These sheets are important in keeping out moisture; if they are damaged, make new ones from heavy plastic film and glue them in place when you reassemble the door.
- Lower the glass fully. Using plastic tools, unsnap the rubber strip which wipes the glass on the outside of the door, and then the fuzzy strip which touches the glass on the inside; both are held by spring loaded clips located in holes in the door itself. Pry between the strips and the body towards the glass. Raise the window halfway. You’ll see that the window regulator attaches to the glass by two arms. It’s impossible to see without a mirror, but there are sheet-metal clips which secure the arms to the metal channel at the bottom of the glass. You can feel them, or see them by using a mirror. The clips are bent by hand after they are installed; this keeps them from coming off. There’s a keyhole-shaped opening in the clip. You need to bend the clip so that it lies flat, then push it so that the large part of the keyhole passes over the stud on the glass channel. Then you can remove the arm from the channel. There’ll be a thin wavy washer between the arm and the channel which helps prevent rattles. Be sure to save this for reuse.
- At the point where the window is halfway down, you’ll need to remove the two M5 bolts (8mm spanner) at the front and rear of the glass channel near the attaching points for the nylon guides. These little bolts don’t appear to do anything, but are in fact the upper limit stops for the glass.
- After the two arms are free of the channel, you’ll see that the glass can be moved around, but that it is held captive by a U-shaped spring attached to the wind-up regulator. The easy way of freeing the spring mentioned above, is to use a standard carpenter’s claw hammer. Insert the end of the oval shaft of the hammer into the U and twist the hammer head - you’ll find the U will open easily and far enough to slide the window complete with its channel out of the regulator.
- Once this is free, the glass can be removed upwards through the slot in the door. Take this opportunity to clean the nylon slides which guide the glass.
- Reassembly is the reverse of removal. The trickiest part is spreading the U-shaped spring to receive the glass; again use the shaft of a claw hammer. After sliding the keyhole clips into place on the arms, bend them over about 90 degrees, as they were before. When installing the window crank, position them so that they are about 45&Mac251; from the upright, when the window is fully closed.
- Finally, adjust the angle the window makes when the door is closed onto the body. It should be a snug, but not tight fit. Close the door slowly and carefully - if the window is just a few mm too high, then slamming the door will shatter the glass as it hits the roof channel. To adjust the glass, use an 11mm socket spanner through the holes in the open and shut faces of the door and physically move the window channels up or down to get a snug fit. These holes in the doors are closed with rubber bungs, when the adjusting is finished.
Snoopy is a Pallas version, so there are thin stainless steel trim pieces at the top and bottom of the doors and a stainless rubbing strip with a grey rubber insert on the door itself. The thin trim pieces are held by plastic rectangles let into holes in the top and bottom edges of the door. Gently prise with a screwdriver and these trims will pop off. My door bottoms were rusted through and some of the plastic trim holders were missing. I replaced them all with new ones from Edgeware Motor Accessories (Tel 0208 952 4789). The new ones will look different in as much as there is a plastic post standing proud. After you have drilled a hole to size in the door, the round piece on the bottom of the plastic rectangle should be an interference fit into this hole. Then tap the plastic post down; this acts as a peg and expands the plastic to fit tightly to the door. The stainless trim, in turn, is tapped down onto the plastic rectangles.
The stainless steel rubbing strips on the door itself were in a bad way. I obtained a complete new set, mail order from Holland: e mail to groups@citroen-andre.com
The stripped door shell was then shot blasted off site and the true extent of the rust revealed. A complete door bottom repair kit was bought from Mike Holmes in Truro (Tel: 01872 864021). This kit is made from zinc coated steel, so one must be careful when welding as the fumes created are toxic. About 4 inches of the door bottom was cut off with an angle grinder and the repair pieces tacked in position, using a MIG welder. One needs to make copious measurements before cutting, to get the repair pieces fitting in the right position. It is also useful to use tan untouched door as a guide for angles etc.
At the top of the door where the slot for the window is formed, a split had occurred, leaving the slot ‘flapping’. This is a common fault with the ‘D’; the window aperture is brazed and constant slamming of the door tends to fracture the braze. I re-brazed the split using a Ronson propane blow torch and a ready fluxed brazing rod.
The new outer door skin repair piece was ‘joddled’ along its top edge. This can be done by using a joddling tool which is like a large pair of pliers with stepped jaws, or in my case using a ‘Rollastep’; the repair panel is held in a vice and the Rollastep tool run along the top edge, using a socket spanner to ‘drive’ it. The aim is to put a rebated step in the repair panel, so that when it is clamped to the door skin, the rebate goes underneath leaving a relatively flush joint. This joint was then plug welded, as running a weld seam along the whole length will distort the panel and you’ll never get the door to fit properly.
Plug welding is where you drill, or punch, a series of 1/4 inch holes in the door skin, clamp the joddled repair panel underneath and then weld through the holes and withdraw still forming a weld bead. With practice the finished repair looks like it has been spot welded. After grinding down the repair line flat, an aluminium based filler is then used to achieve a smooth panel with no evidence of the repair. The historic way of doing this, was by means of ‘lead loading’, but in my opinion an aluminium based filler and a power sander does the job just as well and is easier to use.