Xantia power steering pipe (again)

[CitroenCrazy]

Hi guys

One of my Xantiae suffered the common problem of a leaking power steering pipe. As expected, it was the steel section that descends from above the driveshaft down to the subframe. This is a well known weak point, and I thought I knew all about it.

For those who haven't heard about it before, there's a pipe that starts at the pump, on the offside of the car, goes across to the nearside wheelarch, along, down, and back across to the offside again to connect to the steering control valve. It starts off in 6.5mm steel, has a 30cm rubber section and then back to steel, this time 4.75mm diameter.
It's the latter section that fails and the fix is to replace it with cunifer, creating a new joint at the end of the rubber hose.

So far, so good............but then I realised there's a difficulty I didn't see mentioned before.

The repair pipe requires a Citroen flare on one end and a DIN flare on the other.
No problem. I have a big old flaring tool originally supplied by Pleiades for Citroen pipes and a Sykes Pickavant Flaremaster for the "conventional" DIN flares.

The sting in the tail is that the tooling is designed for different pipe sizes - the DIN flare requires 4.75mm pipe, which is too big to fit in the Citroen tool, but conversely the 4.5mm pipe was too loose to fit in the DIN tool.
I suppose I could have tried shimming the 4.5mm pipe with some aluminium from a coke can, but I decided to use 4.75mm pipe throughout and make a DIN flare in the end of the rubber hose. It worked, the repaired pipe is back in the car and I was initially satisfied.
However, the DIN flare has an M10 thread, as opposed to M8 for the Citroen joint and now I think drilling the end of the rubber hose to M10 was too much, and the metal is too thin.

So, getting to the point, what is the "approved" fix to this ? How do others meet the need for different styled types of hydraulic joints

[wurlycorner]

No help from me I'm afraid - only time I have had to do do this was about 10 years ago (and back then, I bought and fitted - with MUCH swearing - a new complete replacement!) but... I am interested to see the outcome.

Would be even more interested in seeing pics!

[CitroJim]

I'd be tempted to rescue the good flared ends and braze them onto the replacements...

No help from me I'm afraid - only time I have had to do do this was about 10 years ago (and back then, I bought and fitted - with MUCH swearing - a new complete replacement!) but... I am interested to see the outcome.

Ditto... It was a bit of swear-inducing job... On an Activa anyway... Dead easy with the engine removed though

[evilclive]

When mine blew a gentleman sold me replacement pipe for all three bits - the larger pipe to the front of the engine, then an off-the-shelf rubber pipe with some machined adapter pieces to take a normal flare, then normal pipe to the end again. Worked well. I've probably written this up on an older message here.