Simon's new Xantia V6 and Leaf blog

[Mandrake]

Rather tiny gearbox isn't it!

It's only a tiny car Simon!

Just like the gearbox in the C1 - you could almost pop in in your pocket

There's not much inside it. Just a differential and a single permanently engaged step down gear ratio.

No clutch, no control forks, syncro's, nothing. It does have a parking pawl like an automatic box though.

[CitroJim]

You forgot a reverse pinion Simon

Or is revere achieved by reversing the direction of traction motor rotation?

[Mandrake]

You forgot a reverse pinion Simon

Or is revere achieved by reversing the direction of traction motor rotation?

Reverse is electronic. Three phase AC motors can be reversed simply by swapping the phase of any two of the three phase leads!

The gear lever cable only attaches to the gearbox for the purpose of activating the parking pawl. The gears are never disengaged even when in "neutral". Coasting in neutral is achieved simply by leaving the motor electronically disconnected/un-powered, which allows it to freewheel with almost no drag despite the approx 9 to 1 step down gear ratio.

[Mandrake]

This is a continuation from the brake thread below, for anyone who hasn't read it yet to get up to speed:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=60436

The good news is the brake work all went pretty smoothly on Saturday.

Sure enough, the old pads were down to about 3mm of material and the discs were pretty awful, especially around the inside:

The pad carrier whose two mounting bolts I thought might be troublesome to get out on the left hand side wasn't. I just used my large torque wrench (as I don't have a breaker bar) and my standard T55 socket, no problem. They were a bit tight all the way out but once I cleaned the threads in the hole they went back in easily finger tight.

The old pads were wedged into the carrier so tight (rusted ?) that it took a cold chisel and some destruction of pad material to get them out! On the contrary, the new pads were an absolute perfect fit, snug, but I was able to push them back and forth freely just with my fingers. (Unlike the pads that I fitted to the Ion recently where I had to file the ears down quite a bit to get them to fit at all!)

For £15 a disc and about £30 for a full set of pads I'm very happy:

As I mentioned in the other thread, the rear brakes needed a clean and overhaul as well, and the pad locating pin snapped on one side when I tried to remove it, so I bought the little kit that has the pin, nuts, washers, spring clip and stone shield for both sides, on the assumption that the other side would break when i tried to remove it - which it duly did!

Unlike the first side where the pin broke close to the nut making it easy to remove, this one broke half way up the pin, making it impossible to directly extract the pin as the nut was rusted on and difficult to access.

In the end I gave up on any fancy tricks and just used a claw hammer to progressively bend the nut/pin at the blind end util I could thread the now semi-circle pin out the wrong end. That pin is as soft as butter, it's no wonder it snapped once the nut rusted to the housing!

Both pads on that side were rusted to the housing so out they came, everything cleaned up then back in again with the new pins and shields, and brakes bled. Only a little bit of air from the rear brakes.

I took it for a drive expecting it to take a while to bed in (the Ion brakes did) but no, they were working reasonably well immediately which has not been my general experience with new brakes, and within about 10 miles of driving with a few quick stops they felt fully broken in.

And all I can say is WOW, are these brakes good now! Best Xantia brakes I've ever had by far. Previously they were "OK", but they did vibrate when braking from high speed if they were hot (probably all that rust around the middle) and they just didn't seem as sensitive as they should be. A bit "dead" feeling and requiring quite a bit of pedal pressure. I had a similar issue on my old 2.0i which despite lots of work on the brakes never felt right.

These are now really, really impressive. Instead of getting nothing as you press the pedal harder then too much braking, they start responding very smoothly and gently at first but rapidly brake very hard as you push the pedal harder. Very controllable, sensitive, and immense stopping power when you push a bit harder. Very happy. Hopefully it'll wind the needle off the brake tester at the garage during the MOT.

While I was under the car I noticed two annoying things. One was that one of the brake/suspension lines under the rear beside the height corrector looked like it had literally exploded with rust at a bend! I realised it would get spotted in the MOT as it was in a really obvious place and looked bad so I bought some black hammerite to sand and paint it. I was actually concerned enough about the remaining steel left that I was unwilling to sand the pipe while the car was pressurised - so I fully depressurised the suspension and pressure regulator before attempting to sand it just in case so I didn't get an eye full of high pressure oil...

While I was at it I did quite a few other spots where it was starting to rust on bends - it seems like the enamel must have cracked on some of the bends ever so slightly when manufactured allowing water in to eventually rust them. All tided up now though and protected from getting any worse:

I then noticed one other problem that I wasn't expecting - a noisy hole in the exhaust that I only just replaced less than 4 years ago!

To be fair, it was only a cheap £70 exhaust, and the car has sat a lot in the last year which is never good for exhaust rust due to pooled condensation sitting in the pipes.

You can't hear it while driving but certainly can from outside near the rear of the car, and I'm sure it will get bigger quickly...so I'm now faced with a dilemma. I want to book it in for an MOT in 2 weeks but do I:

1) Feign ignorance and see if it just gets a warning and sort it out once the MOT is safely secured...

2) Put some kind of patch on it (goo and metal strap ?) to silence it and slow down the deterioration until I can get a chance to replace it properly.

3) Order another exhaust for it - the joint between the middle silencer and cat is in really bad shape too and doesn't have long for this world, so it would really need a whole new system from cat tail back. After £74 for brake parts a minimum of £80 for even a cheap exhaust will be a hard sell with the other half just at the moment for a car that doesn't get used much.

I'm not equipped to do exhaust work for the inevitable problems that crop up fitting an aftermarket one where they need tweaking (nor do I have time in the next few weeks) so I think I'd probably just have to ask the local garage doing the MOT for me (who are pretty good) to fit it for me...

A quick look on ebay turns up this one which looks the same as the one I have now:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Citroen-Xant ... SwepZXRGDx

Anyone use a Gerlach exhaust before ?

Decisions...

[white exec]

Well done on the brakes, Simon. Reward in itself!
It all looks very dry under there, and ought to have a good waxing - especially those hydraulic pipes.
Best time of the year to do it.

[DHallworth]

I bought one of the cheap polish exhausts for the Activa with the wonky tips as I'm intending to get it a stainless exhaust made up. Other then a wonky tip, it was very easy to fit and sounds quite good. I'm sure it was around £65. If I were you, as s short term measure, I'd get a tin of gun gum from Halfords or the likes and spread it around that hole. Wear gloves as it really sticks to your fingers! Get a good thick layer of it on it and leave it for a long while to Harden before you start the car so it doesn't blow through it and it should be fine if driven gently to the MOT

The V6 brakes when sorted are fantastic, my Activa when it left the factory had the smaller brakes on it, I changed them to the V6 brakes before I changed the engine and couldn't get over the difference. I managed to bag a set of genuine discs on eBay for £40 the pair and had genuine brake pads on the shelf in the shed that I'd bought on eBay for about £23.

I forgot I had the pads so I fitted Pagid pads to it initially and was petrified of them! The brake fade from it when pushing on was utterly lethal! I fitted the genuine pads and no matter how violently you brake now there's no fade whatsoever even during a 20 minute track session last year.

Glad to see she's still behaving

David.

[Mandrake]

I bought one of the cheap polish exhausts for the Activa with the wonky tips as I'm intending to get it a stainless exhaust made up. Other then a wonky tip, it was very easy to fit and sounds quite good. I'm sure it was around £65.

The exhaust that's on the car now is one of those same Polish ones, I think I paid £70 for it. If you recall, you and your 208 pal helped fit it for me - must have only been 3 years ago or less as I've only had the car since mid 2014. I remember that the hangers needed bending a bit, also that the angle of the bend on the pipe where it goes onto the rear silencer wasn't quite right, causing some sealing difficulties at the rear muffler joint which I had to reseal about 6 months later but maybe that was a one off manufacturing error when doing the pipe bends.

Looking at my ebay history the exhaust I linked to a few posts ago does indeed seem to be the same one from the same guy - Tomasz Gerlach. When you check the address on Google street view it's a medium size barn similar to your dad's garage in the middle of the country surrounded by farmland, so I can only assume based on the huge number of different exhausts he lists for sale and the 3 week delivery time that he just makes the exhausts to order and then ships them. I contacted him by ebay and he said he has sold a few Xantia V6 exhausts and not had any feedback about alignment issues.

I hope yours lasts better, mine is rusted pretty badly now at the muffler joint and also at the cat joint:

The outer sleeve of the cat tail is rusted away on one side, so there is not much holding it together now, although remarkably it isn't leaking at all. Because this cat tail is going to require some work to fit a new exhaust I've decided to go for a temporary fix for the MOT leading to....

If I were you, as s short term measure, I'd get a tin of gun gum from Halfords or the likes and spread it around that hole. Wear gloves as it really sticks to your fingers! Get a good thick layer of it on it and leave it for a long while to Harden before you start the car so it doesn't blow through it and it should be fine if driven gently to the MOT

I must have read your mind. The night before you posted that I went to halfords to get both some gun gum and a bandage:

I've tried the bandages before on their own and they don't work for this kind of hole as the surface isn't flat, but I was also concerned that the gun gum by itself would blow out in a relatively short time, so I combined the two. I put loads of gun gum around the area of the hole and a coating all the way around the circumference of the pipe as well, then I fitted the bandage around it as well:

I let the car idle for about 30 minutes to heat up the pipe and allow both the gum and the bandage to set, plus I was going to give it a couple of days before trying to drive it. It's completely silent at the moment but I won't know until I've driven it how well it might last.

With that silenced I've now discovered that there is a slight exhaust blow under the engine bay somewhere. It's not at the front downpipe, I think it may be the rear downpipe from the rear bank but I haven't had a chance to look yet, but it's minor so hopefully won't get picked up.

After mostly driving an EV for the last year and doing all the high mileage in it and doing nothing to it other than brakes, I'd forgotten how much I hate dealing with exhaust problems!

This patch will hopefully get me through the MOT but I think I'll have to order another exhaust from Tomasz and fit it later this year - I'm just a bit scared of running into problems trying to figure out how to couple it to the cat when half the cat tail outer sleeve has rusted away.

On my old V6 the outer sleeve broke cleanly off, and I then ended up hacksawing some slots in the pipe from the centre silencer and using a standard U-bolt clamp onto the main inner cat tail, which seemed to work!

However with half of a rusted outer sleeve still present that would get in the way of the U-bolt.

The V6 brakes when sorted are fantastic, my Activa when it left the factory had the smaller brakes on it, I changed them to the V6 brakes before I changed the engine and couldn't get over the difference. I managed to bag a set of genuine discs on eBay for £40 the pair and had genuine brake pads on the shelf in the shed that I'd bought on eBay for about £23.

I forgot I had the pads so I fitted Pagid pads to it initially and was petrified of them! The brake fade from it when pushing on was utterly lethal! I fitted the genuine pads and no matter how violently you brake now there's no fade whatsoever even during a 20 minute track session last year.

Glad to see she's still behaving

These Bosch discs and Pads seem really good, someone suggested they might be the OEM type ? If so at £15 a disc (normally £65 ea) they are a steal.

I pushed them reasonably hard after they were bedded in and found no hint of fade, and they easily get the tyres chirping when braking on a hot road.

It's not just the all out braking that is really good now, they're also very smooth and progressive right from gentle braking to hard braking - I'd say the reason is that the old pads were rusted into the pad carriers and weren't able to move at all until you pushed the brakes hard. Now the pads can slide smoothly and freely so they start working with the lightest touch of the brake.

The brakes in my old V6 were OK, but nothing great, and the brakes in my 2.0i in New Zealand (which used the smaller brakes your Active would have come with) were awful by Citroen standards and we could never get to the bottom of the problem - discs and pads were almost new when I got the car and yet they were very insensitive, whereas the brakes in Dad's 2.0i - exactly the same brake design were pretty decent, although still not nearly as good as this car is now.

[DHallworth]

I've just found the email receipt for my exhaust from August 2016... It came from an eBay seller called "premium-car" and cost me £58 for the centre section and back box.

I remember yours needing a bit of modifying to fit but the one I had went straight on and was a perfect fit.

David.

[Zelandeth]

I'd say that a tiny hole like that would get an advisory for "exhaust (insert section here) has a minor leak of exhaust gases" and that would be the end of it. The one on the Lada is puffing merrily from several places and it never got a second look.

[Mandrake]

I've just found the email receipt for my exhaust from August 2016... It came from an eBay seller called "premium-car" and cost me £58 for the centre section and back box.

I remember yours needing a bit of modifying to fit but the one I had went straight on and was a perfect fit.

I wasn't able to find that seller on ebay - can you check your order history to see if the entry is still there and clickable ? It's possible the seller has changed their username, but the link to a previous purchase should still work enough to take you to the sellers page, even if they've changed their username.

I have a hunch that while the username is different the one I linked to is the same guy who did both your exhaust and the one on my car.

[Mandrake]

Well she passed. No mention of any exhaust leaks.

Not without a warning for the rear brakes though. I was a little bit taken aback by that one as I wasn't expecting it.

When I tested the brakes recently after the new front discs/pads I found the overall braking to be outstanding, and there is no problem with the rear of the car rising under heavy braking either - which is usually a sign the rear brakes aren't working.

He said that the rear brakes were well below what they should be, I can't remember for sure but I think he said 60% or 65%. But because the new discs and pads on the front were performing so well the total "service brake performance" which includes front+rear was above the acceptable threshold to pass.

We had a conversation about the rear load balancing system where I tried to explain how it worked and that the rear brakes run from the rear suspension pressure, so when the car is unladen they will only operate at about 50% of their maximum possible braking power, but he was adamant that the brake testing machine automatically takes that into account by measuring the axle weight and scaling the expected braking force accordingly. In other words if I were to load the rear up the brake force would increase but the extra weight would cause the machine to expect more brake force in proportion as well - with no net improvement in the ability to pass the test.

A couple of months ago the rear brakes weren't working at all after the car hadn't been driven for a long time, which was very apparent from the rear suspension hitting the top bump stops any time I tried to brake hard, so when I did the front discs I also had the rear pads out and gave the rear brakes a quick overhaul. Two of the pads were seized in the holders due to corrosion and there was also some air in the lines. I also filed back a significant rust lip on the edge of the discs, gave the pad surfaces a quick rough up on the concrete (*) as they looked very glazed, refitted them all and the rear brakes seemed to work quite well afterwards, certainly they didn't seem weak to me, and there was no more trouble with the rear lifting under hard braking.

* In hindsight I think roughing the surface of the glazed pads up might have been a mistake, as the disc has significant wear, with slight circular "grooves" having formed on the disc surfaces which the pads would have adapted to over time. By roughing the pad surface up and flattening it they're probably not bedded in properly now so this may result in them not working as well as they should until they have a few hundred miles on them, and the car has only done about 30 miles between brake work and MOT! To be honest while the pads seem good the discs are pretty average looking, so if anything is going to be the cause of the rear brakes not working properly it's unevenness of the discs causing a poor contact area with the pads.

He seemed pretty convinced that the discs and pads weren't the problem and that it's a hydraulic problem, or something wrong with the "load balancer". There really isn't anything to go wrong with the "load balancer" IMO - the rear brakes run from rear suspension pressure, so rear suspension pressure limits rear braking effort. End of story! There isn't a control block of any sort like the load balancer on conventional braking systems in some estates.

I'm not sure what to do for next years MOT - I'm not confident that throwing a load in the boot will get past the test easier if the testing machine really does scale the result based on the axle weight, so there may genuinely be a problem. If there is I think it surely has to be the condition of the disc surfaces and the best solution is new discs and pads at the rear for next years MOT.

Of course that does mean trying to remove the dreaded caliper mounting bolts without breaking them!

And given that even the pad retaining bolt snapped on both sides due to corrosion on the nut I think my chances are poor.

[white exec]

Rear brakes on these cars do very little work, so discs can get well polished, and pads (and pistons) dwell very much in one position, for years at a time. Fronts get a chance for a regular workout, but not the rears.
Rear discs and pads are quite tiny (certainly so on XM), so a new set of both shouldn't cost too much. That ought to improve performance.

[xantia_v6]

When I had a similar problem, it was cured by fitting a set of softer (Mintex) pads to the rear brakes. Perhaps the friction coefficient of the front and rear pads should be matched.

[DHallworth]

Simon, I've just looked on eBay, the seller I bought mine from is no longer trading on eBay it appears.

David.

[white exec]

Just read this, and thought Simon might find the technical (incl. charging) detail interesting...
www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/new-cars/aud ... d-tomorrow
Audi's new '55' Quatro (e-Tron) BEV looks quite something.
First ones built in Brussels.
Nice to see an interior without a massive video screen atop the dash.
Not so sure about the door-mounted video screens to "eliminate" the door mirrors . . . these would mean taking your eyes well and truly off the road, and a massive shift of focus.
$74,000 and upwards it seems.

The recent 'new' Leaf looks interesting, too.