Suspension protection

[migdsouza]

What solutions are there for cleaning and then protecting the exposed suspension components under the car and especially within the wheel arches?

[GiveMeABreak]

Suspension pipes are going to be more of an issue as these are either in short supply or no longer available. A clean up and some sort of galvanising protection / waxoil may be the way top go.

As for the arches - you really only have the struts here and there's nothing you can do to protect these as they are bonded units. The struts already have protective boots on which are also bonded top the strut - so if these start to leak it will need replacing basically. You can't really do much for these as they are designed to move and be flexible.

[Jay-Bruce]

I've developed fittings that allow Citroen LDS hydraulics to be piped up with conventional brake pipe style "single flares". However, to make that work, you need to use my pipe nuts and adapter nipples together with the high rated cuni tubing I've sourced, but it works, when used together as a system. Normal copper brake pipe will most likely blow off at LDS working pressure, and typical brake pipe flare nuts don't have the internal shoulder that mine do, so they only really exert pressure on one point of the flared cone, whereas mine clamp down on the entire flared cone, offering much better seal, and significantly less chance for the nut to cut into the flared section.

So I've taken care of the small bore tubing from the BHI (pump/tank/ECU combo unit) to the firmness regulators. There is another dude one here called SVOD who has developed a means of making replacements for the larger pipes/hose/pipe assemblies from the firmness regulators to the suspension cylinders, but he seems to have dropped off the radar? If you look in the sticky threads at the top of the forums you'll see some info from both SVOD and myself. If SVOD doesn't come back on the forum in the next couple of months, I'll retrace his steps and look at making something to replace the firmness regulator to suspension cylinder pipework.

So yeah, not much can be done to PROTECT the pipes, but the community has developed parts to REPLACE the pipework, and thus overcome Citroen's discontinuation of these pipes.

[Jay-Bruce]

This post has some info on what I've done with the pipework:

OK, so I had been thinking about this, the premise of the LDS fitting is that tube nut pushes down on the fixed to the pipe cone, which pushes the pipe further into the tapered hole which bites on the o-ring. Any flare with a free cone isn't going to work like that, while it might seal, it's decidedly not right. So I designed the exquisite nipples pictured here:


As pretty as they are, I wasn't too keen on the o-ring at the bottom being twisted, so I actually contemplated a 3 piece redesign of that nipple to allow the bottom threaded section to rotate freely relative to the o-ring groove, but even to me this was an over-engineered to [expletive] solution. So I took myself aside and forced myself to an Elon "First Principles" moment, which culminated in me deciding to ditch the nose gubbins from the nipple design, and coat the threads going into the port with a hydraulic thread-sealing compound. So the simplified part looks like this:


These are then ran into the LDS ports with a thread sealant applied:



Our C5 (X7) is now running on 4 of these new simplified nipples:

You'll see I've replaced the flexi pipe from the ally union to the firmness regulator with a cunifer pipe, and on the other side of the union, the fore to aft pipe is also new cunifer, all connected using my new fittings. They ran up to pressure no leaks etc, no dramas, so I'm going to say I've got a very effective and reasonably cheap solution to the unobtainable LDS pipe fittings.

[Rp0thejester]

I suppose the only way you could protect the spring in the suspension is to feed a flexible hose over the whole spring whilst the spring is off the car, thus preventing water and salt sitting on the spring. Apart from that, I'm not sure more could be done apart from devising a bag system to cover the whole lot

[migdsouza]

I was thinking more about the likes of Lanoguard. Back in the 80's when I worked as a motorcycle courier, I used to spray my entire bike (not seat, brakes, or tyres!) with WD40 weekly during the winter, and it did amazingly well at preserving the chrome and alloy from salt damage. I've since learnt that a lot of rubber / silicone / plastic etc. is not very tolerant to it. Lanolin on the otherhand (the main constituent of Languard) is a natural oil product and does not cause such damage.

[Rp0thejester]

Waxoyl could work well if applied enough at certain points, it's known to block air from rusting services to prevent further rusting. Works well on museum exhibits so should work on moving parts with regular application

[Rp0thejester]

We have loads of OFF Topic chats here, waxoyl has been mentioned before, look through them and join in