Wow, thats a confusing lot of contradictions and questions, but I'll give it a go....
gadgetgricey wrote:Hi everyone, looking for a bit of advice/guidance if that's O.K.
Just bought a xantia and I think there is reduced pressure to the rear suspension. You can push the back of the car down with ease. The front of the car is fine.
Ok, first up, being able to push the rear of the car down by hand easily is normal....
When spheres age they gradually lose their gas and the suspension becomes stiffer, not softer. If the spheres were old and stuffed the suspension would be stiff, and eventually become rigid...
So when you say the front of the car is "fine" do you mean it is stiff ? If it is, it's probably not fine...
(Although the front should feel approximately twice as stiff as the rear)
Checked the service history and both rear spheres were changed less than two years ago.
So chances are they're probably ok.
Also if you increase the ride height to the one above normal (not maximum) the rear suspension becomes rock hard.
That could just mean the manual height override linkage adjustment at the rear is a bit out. There is a kind of sliding clamp arrangement on the rod that travels along the underbody from the height control, which is set by losening the bolt, sliding the rod along a bit and tightening it again.
Normally you set it by having the height lever at the normal ride position, and the rear suspension sitting at the normal height - losen the clamp (NOT the rollbar clamp) slide it so the peg is in the middle of the elongated slot and tighten it again. Somewhere on the forum there are some diagrams of this. (Note: the rear of the car needs to be driven onto ramps to do this)
I've rung four garages and had seperate answers ranging from spheres are knackered, the middle sphere was not replaced, its the ECU as its a hydractive suspension or its the height adjuster bar??
Also the system stays firm when the ignition is off. Cant move the back end it stays rigid.
Well on a Hydractive 2 model such as yours there is a soft mode and a hard mode. The soft mode is the normal driving mode, while the hard mode is activated for a short time by the computer during vigorous cornering, accelerating or braking, to improve handling.
Because the soft mode requires significant power to energize the solenoids, 30 seconds after you turn off the key (or 10 minutes if you leave any doors open) the power to the solenoids is cut off and it reverts to hard mode.
Opening a door with the key off will energize the solenoids again for up to 10 minutes or until 30 seconds after the doors are closed again.
Hard mode is rather stiff, especially the damping, and if you just try to bounce the suspension by hand you'll find that the heavy damping prevents it from moving significantly, especially the front.
However if you sit on the back and get someone to measure the height drop (dont open the boot or it will go back to soft mode) you should find it will still go down a couple of inches. And when you get off it will slowly (1 - 2 seconds) return to the previous height. Thats how stiff the damping is in hard mode.
The hard mode is controlled only by the "corner" spheres, while the soft mode is a composite of the corner and centre spheres, but is affected most by the centre sphere.
What's the concensus of opinion. What would happen if the non-hydractive sphers were fitted in error.
If non-hydractive strut spheres were fitted in error, the soft mode would become much too soft to the point of floatiness, and the hard mode would be approximately as soft as the soft mode should be.
is there a way to check on the speheres that are fitted which ones they are.
Yep, find the code number printed on the sphere and post it here and several regulars to the forum have part number tables to look up the spheres...
There are usually two numbers - a two digit number stamped near the end filler plug which is the gas pressure in bars, and a longer number about 6 digits beginning with a 9 which is the part number for a genuine sphere, or a number starting with N for a GSF (Amtex?) sphere.
Regards,
Simon
