Spherical mystery

[Old-Guy]

Rooting through my stock of salvaged parts in preparation for taking a boot-full to The Chevrons Rally in a fortnight, I unearthed a couple of genuine Citroen spheres.

96238949
5-188-FM

Punched with chevron logo, 45 (volume) and C41; they also have 3 dimples around the filler valve, which I believe means they are the multi-layer, long-life diaphragm type.

Can't find the 96... part number on service.citroen or in any of my sphere tables including the old GSF one.

I think they are the front pair off the VSX because, not knowing any better at the time, I threw away the original set from the 'Green Lady'. I must have had a reason for keeping them...

Can anyone identify them please?

[elma]

There's a table quite far down this page.

Looks like a front centre sphere for hydractive 2 Xantia after 1996.

[elma]

Sorry not centre, front corner sphere for hydractive 2.

[Old-Guy]

Ta muchly!

The eccentricities of search engines!

Playing with permutations of inserted spaces, Google finally found that page for me while you were kindly typing your post.

That's actually a very useful page, not only does it show full data for all spheres but it also includes the neat little diagram printed on one flap of every box of IHFS spheres.

[Old-Guy]

Having identified the sphere, I realise that the sphere table on the Wiki is even more incomplete than I thought (due to my ignorance of Activa suspension, I thought it best to omit rather than risk misleading).

So I started doing some research on Comfort and Multi-layer spheres - and a couple of useful sources:

New diaphragms for re-buildable spheres from citroen-andre.com
a complete Citroen suspension catalogue dated 2002 downloadable here