The hydraulic system

The index  below and the separate chapters of this course are a copy of the hydraulic course notes supplied by Citroën in 1969. At first sight the hydraulic system of the Citroën D-models may seem incredible complicated and almost impossible to understand but a carefull study of these course notes will reveal most of its secrets and, at the same time, also increase the respect for Paul Mages and his engineers who designed this system.

Although the course is really good, I have tried to improve it a bit by adding colour to the pictures and by including animations of how the different hydraulic units work.

Because scanning all the text and pictures and especially creating the animations is an awfull lot of work, I only managed to complete the first 3 chapters of this course and 1 animation (the 7-piston HP-pump) up till now, but the rest will follow one day ...

... 5 years (!!) later I have added chapters 5, 6 and 7, a few weeks later chapter 4 is finished also !!

Now I have to polish up the first three chapters a bit ...

 Hydraulic course notes

  1. Repair practice
  2. General circuit layouts
  3. Source of pressure
  4. Suspension
  5. Distribution and regulation of pressure
  6. Braking
  7. Steering
  8. Hydraulic control of clutch and gearchange
     
  9. GS and CX, 16 pages from the 1977 edition of these 'notes' (2.3 Mb PDF file)

Hydraulic system problem solving guide

The problem solving quide for the hydraulic system below is official Citroën literature, transformed into a PDF file by Tony Jackson.