Concrete blocks attached to rear suspension of Pluriel

Well, I stand corrected. These things are not concrete they appear to be cast iron or steel. Flipping heavy is the big one. Easy to remove, even with the wheel still on. Two 13mm nuts which are connected to washers. Simply undo both then slide the hanger connected to the weight towards the outside of the car and be VERY ready to take the weight as the plate slips off the two bolts.

Once removed, I took the wife's car for a spin going over potholes, quickly round bends and as fast as she is ever likely to drive.

The knocking noise has gone and the car performs perfectly normally. The central mounting bolt attaches to the right angled plate and the bolt goes through a tube which is attached by rubber to the weight. This rubber is kind of star shaped and obviously is designed to allow the weight to move. Trouble is it allows the weight to move too much. The rubber must be "tired". I thought of various things I could do to improve things and other might like to try them too. 1/ dismantle and clean the whole thing out very carefully then obtain some liquid rubber and put that all around the flexible joint. There are gaps to be filled. That might retain flexibility but reduce excess flexibility.
2/ working on the principle that parts of cars tend to wear in one direction, I removed the plate and reattached it mounted 90 degrees round from its original position.
3/ to stop the wretched thing falling off and killing the person driving down the road behind you, you could make it more secure by finding a penny washer of exactly the right dimensions to take the central bolt and still fit inside the weight with a slight gap, enough to allow it to flex but not enough to allow the weight to drop off should the last remnants of rubber separate.

But for the moment the wife will be driving around with it off. If a problem occurs I'll let you know.

Cheers!

Stanleysteamer wrote:Well, I stand corrected. These things are not concrete they appear to be cast iron or steel. Flipping heavy is the big one. Easy to remove, even with the wheel still on. Two 13mm nuts which are connected to washers. Simply undo both then slide the hanger connected to the weight towards the outside of the car and be VERY ready to take the weight as the plate slips off the two bolts.

Once removed, I took the wife's car for a spin going over potholes, quickly round bends and as fast as she is ever likely to drive.

The knocking noise has gone and the car performs perfectly normally.

Thank you for all the pictures and the procedure to fix these odd looking things.

Did you test drive with the roof up or down, you may find they are there with the roof in a particular configuration?

Something to be aware of; by removing the dampers/weights you have modified the suspension from the manufacturers specification.

Technically I would say this is something you should be telling your insurers about, especially if you go along the route of not re-fitting.

I also suspect that the dampers won't affect handling, more like likely they are there to prevent some sort of noise or vibration as C3driver52 says. But needless to say you've modified the set-up.

I would also say it's very unlikely that in the normal course of use anyone is ever going to know, maybe it would be flagged up at MOT.

Just something to think about where insurance companies are concerned.

Guys, you are of course right. Sadly there is probably much truth in the insurance angle. Even though they are not there to improve braking, shock absorption or road-holding, as far as anyone can tell. I just know that if we did modify the car that way the insurance company would take a dim view of it and would charge more than the cost of replacement. So I have now decided to to put it back on, with the washer mod, to make it safe and hopefully less noisy. Once we are in France I'll go to a Citroen garage, or better still a breakers and get another one. It weighs so much I'll keep the old one and take it to a scrap metal dealer I know and weigh it in!

I didn't test it with the roof down. I have no idea how much the two arches weigh, we never take them off due to all the stories of the chance of leaks once you put them back on, but if they weigh quite a bit then the weights might conceivably compensate to some extent for their absence. After all, with other convertibles the roof still stays on the car, in one way or another.

But the rattle really is annoying!

Hey ho! What larks, eh? Thanks for the thoughts.

I think this will be my last comment on this area. I have had a really good look at this beast. Once the bolt is removed you find a rubber bush at the top which is separate from the main rubber affair in the middle. This bush does not fit the bolt, it is of a much wider diameter, but when the weight moves a long way, i.e. when going over a small hole or lump in the road, it knocks against the bolt. None of the branches of the star shape that connects the inner bush to the outer bush were broken. So the rattling must be down to the rubber simply being tired. I debated putting little strips of rubber down in between the branches of the star and gluing them to the outer and inner parts. But it looked very fiddly and unlikely to be a great success.

I looked on the internet for a spare but the main people like European Car Parts, did not list it, only one car breaker had one and he wanted £30 plus carriage, which, with the enormous weight, was £10. I asked the mileage of the donor car but got no answer, so I am not bothering.

So I decided to put a bit of tape around the bolt where it sits in the middle of the top bush so that when the weight moves it does not make so much noise and I also moved the weight 90 degrees on the mount as mentioned before.

And although I thought I could replace it without taking the wheel off, it is possible to hang it on the two bolts but doing up the nuts is very awkward so I took the wheel off, which again added time into the whole thing. Lucky thing I did as otherwise I would not have noticed the thread with the problem. Thank heavens for thread nuts when you are in a hurry!

Drove from Bournemouth to Bath and back tonight, on A roads, B roads and very narrow country roads. 120 miles and not a peep out of it, so well happy.

Hope this is of some use to all other Pluriel drivers with the same problem. Obviously not the ultimate solution, that would have to be an (expensive) replacement with a new part, but this should stop the annoying banging while still keeping the car as it was built. I was in a hurry so did not fit the penny washer mentioned earlier in this post. We would have been too late to go to the theatre, so I may well still do this at a later date, then even if the rubber all sheared off, the weight would still stay in place. So hard to imagine that Citroen thought it was such a good idea to have this enormous weight hanging off relatively flimsy rubber, which is designed to flex all the time. The penny washer safety device ought to have been designed in to it. No idea what it weighs but it must be at least ten kilos.

Cheers!

Thanks for the update and good to know you found a solution.

Something to be aware of when following a Pluriel down the road, beware of large weights falling off!

On one of our family cars (non-Citroen) with suspension parts and rattles, I've pack the movement with grease. I got some designed for use near rubber (it's not supposed to affect the rubber?) and every couple of months I use a grease gun to pack the area. It does wear off with time but surprisingly for something under the car it lasts quite a while. In my case it's the front of a stabilising arm where the spigot on the front is worn. A replacement costs £100s and requires dropping the back axle to fit. Like you, second hand parts aren't worth considering as they'll be just as worn and I've already changed the bushes which only worked for a few months anyway.

Hey, so i've read the OP's post and removed these dampers from my car. The nuts were rusted completely, so we removed it with a hammer, because it was all held on some weak aluminium castings. I've noticed some new vibrations from the back of the car, especially noticeable at lower speeds at about 2k rpm, so for anyone thinking of removing them, be vary that they indeed have a purpose there, although they look stupid and are fun to hit like a boxing bag.