March 26, 2019 – front bumper and headlights reinstalled

While waiting for the new fuel pressure regulator to arrive, I cleaned up the front bumper in preparation to reinstall it.  I removed the 3 rubber bumper pads and the 2 turn signal housings from it and started polishing the stainless steel.  Here are a couple of picture of the polishing work in-progress with the passenger side polished and the driver side untouched – quite a difference!

This close up really shows the contrast!

Next, I decided to upgrade the turn signal housings with new ones.  In this picture you see the dirty housings at top with the “common” yellow and white lenses.  Below are 2 brand new housings from my parts stash with 2 brand new clear lenses – the clear lenses were only used in a couple of markets to my knowledge – Italy was one of them, and this car was sold as an Italian market SM, so…  Interestingly, the left and right lenses are different even though they didn’t need to be (they fit on either side) – they are molded with the wording “Made in France” on them so you know if you have them on the proper side if that wording isn’t upside down when you mount the lens.  It is amazing that Citroen had the two lenses manufactured with that minor difference – cost was not a concern with building the SM!

And here is the bumper nearly ready for installation:

Here it is loosely bolted in place on the car:

With the bumper installed – the next item is the headlight unit.  You can see my cleanup of the headlight unit here.  I also had to repair the hydraulics used for turning the inner lights (see lower half of this posting) and the hydraulics for the vertical alignment of the light housings (posted here).  It is good to see the headlights back on the car!

 

With the headlight unit installed, next was to connect the hydraulic actuators to the steering rods so the turning high beams can do their thing – easy job and the lights turn with the steering!!!!!

Last item today was to put on the cold air intake housing that sits above the radiator – the air filter hoses plug into big rubber grommets on the back side of this panel:

My garage space is starting to look much more open as parts are quickly moving from shelves to the car- all that’s left to attach are:

• 2 driveshafts
• 2 front fenders,
• lower valance under the bumper (with brake cooling ducts and transmission belly pan)
• the hood