"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
11/23/2015 at 18:12 • Filed to: Citroen, DS, Citromatic
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"Cé hé sin" (michael-m-mouse)
11/23/2015 at 18:12 • Filed to: Citroen, DS, Citromatic | 5
| 6 |
You may at some fortunate time find yourself possessed of a DS rather like this later one with the famous steering headlights (unless you buy it in America where these were foreign and probably evil and you get fixed and exposed sealed beams instead):
The Goddess (Google it...) as we all know has certain peculiarities, most of them involving exotic hydraulic fluid. Hydropneumatic suspension, power steering, power brakes - they all use it.
But there’s more. If you choose your DS with care you’ll find that it has the Citromatic transmission in which the clutch and gearchange are also powered by this rather special fluid. Take a look at the dash of this specimen and you’ll see a delicate little lever protruding upwards. While looking you’ll also see that it has a button instead of a brake pedal but that’s for another day.
Look more closely and we see that it moves in this gate:
If we look at a diagram we see that it’s like this:
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If we remember any French we had to learn at school we recall that AR is arriere which is backwards and so we assume that D is drive and the other positions are for manual gearchanges.
And we’d be wrong. D is démarrer, to start. To start we engage D which both starts the engine and prevents us from trying to start in gear. Having done this we proceed to 1 and the hydraulics engage the gear and away we go with the aid of a centrifugal clutch.
Next we put the dainty little lever in 2, lift the accelerator, the hydraulics do their thing and we’re in second.
So there you have it. Automated clutch and manual gearchange from sixty years ago and it was apparently quite reliable by the standards of the day.
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OPPOsaurus WRX
> Cé hé sin
11/23/2015 at 21:03 |
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Jayvincent
> Cé hé sin
11/23/2015 at 21:31 |
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They are a class unto themselves. Exotic yet surprisingly reliable engineering. James May hoonage required:
Berang
> Cé hé sin
11/24/2015 at 18:04 |
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ah yes, the crowbar of embriage
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Cé hé sin
> Berang
11/24/2015 at 18:59 |
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You what?
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Berang
> Cé hé sin
11/24/2015 at 19:19 |
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Cé hé sin
> Berang
11/25/2015 at 04:53 |
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Ah, embrayage! Clutch.
I remember seeing that episode, back in the days when they were rather less grey and haggard looking.
Modern C4 Picasso automatics still have a little shiny crowbar of embrayage.