Mid/Late December 2018 – Engine Shipped & Headlights Turned!

David struggled a bit to get the rebuilt engine crated in the engine crate I used, but after a few attempts he got it!  He had to rebuild the wooden framing I created to cradle the engine as the wood I used to ship it to him (shown immediately below) had cracked :-(.

Here is the engine in the crate getting ready to come back to me:

David shipped the crate last week and I have an ETA of December 31 for its arrival in Seattle at the freight station!!!!!

Meanwhile, I got some time into cleaning up the headlight system.  I started with this:

As part of disassembly, I got access to the hood latches and related frames.  They cleaned up nicely.  This picture shows the driver’s side cleaned and the passenger side with horns not yet cleaned:

After removing the headlight buckets and cleaning them up, I started investigating why the driver’s side turning light wasn’t turning.  It was due to a blown seal in the slave cylinder (the unit on the bottom of the headlight bucket) – you can see the tear in the seal below the clear plastic plunger housing here:

I replaced the seal with one I had in my spares and did some research on how to refill the system (the lines are hard and there are simple brass plugs at each end of the them – not easy to fill and bleed air out of them).  I came across this idea on the “Aussie Frogs” forum (Australian Citroen Owners) – using a Luer Lock fitting and a syringe (just like for a drip feed with medical patient):

So – here are the actuating cylinders that sit just in front of the steering rack on the driver’s side after I cleaned them up and introduced a Luer Lock setup – using the 3-way petcock, I was able to force fluid into the line, then draw air bubbles back up and discharge them out the 3rd side of the 3-way petcock.

Got the lines nice and full and no “spongey-ness” (i.e. virtually no air in the system).  Here is my “headlight fluid applicator” – screws right into the 3-way luer petcock:

Here is the driver’s side headlight after cleanup and the repaired slave cylinder – this is the underside showing the hydraulics for the turning headlight:

Passenger side:

And the pair of them – looking pretty nice!!

And here is a video of the lights in action (bear in mind I’m using one hand to hold the iphone to record and the other to actuate the lights – quite a feat!!)!

Next up is to clean up the headlight housings and reassemble the unit for installation on the car.