1993 Citroen BX 19TXD

[MrOtter]

Thought some of you might be interested in seeing my latest purchase, a 93 Citroen BX 1.9 diesel. It's only my second car (the Mini being the first obviously) and I fancied getting something a bit different to the Mini, but that's still quirky and interesting (in my opinion anyway) and with the added bonus of being able to get 50-60mpg whilst cruising around very comfortably.

It's had lots of work done recently, including just having its MOT done this past week (which cost the previous owner £350 to get done) so I'm pretty pleased at picking it up for only £425. There are lots of little niggly things that are wrong with it (including a bit of rust) but it drives really nicely and almost everything works properly.

I bought it with a set of roof bars already fitted, but seeing as I'm not going to be carrying anything big around in the near future, I took them off straight away after we got it home, so the next two pics show the car as I got it, and then without the bars.





I won't be doing too much to it really, just fixing all the little broken things first, so there won't be many updates and they'll probably be quite boring, but if anyone is interested in funny old French cars with magic suspension then keep an eye on this

Thanks for reading

The Otter

[Deleted]

look at them wheels....that's so 90s!!!!

[Rich]

Bookmarked
Are the roofbars genuine or after market? I have roofbars for mine and a set of genuine ski holders but they don't fit the roof bars I have

[MrOtter]

Jun 10, 2013 12:58:24 GMT Rich said:

Bookmarked
Are the roofbars genuine or after market? I have roofbars for mine and a set of genuine ski holders but they don't fit the roof bars I have

No idea on the bars, how do you tell if they're genuine or not? They're Thule ones with rubber pads on the underside of the feet if that means anything?

[stwat]

Love it. The last of the quirky Citroëns.

[Rich]

Jun 10, 2013 13:07:36 GMT MrOtter said:

Jun 10, 2013 12:58:24 GMT Rich said:

Bookmarked
Are the roofbars genuine or after market? I have roofbars for mine and a set of genuine ski holders but they don't fit the roof bars I have

No idea on the bars, how do you tell if they're genuine or not? They're Thule ones with rubber pads on the underside of the feet if that means anything?

Then they are Thule ones can I have a look at them at some point, maybe if you are at area52. Want to try to find some that are ski holder compatible XD

[tubthumper]

Bargain for £425

[rob963]

certainly a bargain for £425 if the MOT cost the guy £350!

well done on getting one, looking forward to seeing it at some point and I will keep an eye on this

[tubthumper]

I had the pleasure of one of these for 2 weeks back in 1993, when I was lent one from the works car pool. My daily at the time was a seriously lowered Dolomite 1500, so the BX felt like a rocket ship/magic carpet in comparison. I had a lot of fun raising and lowering it in traffic jams and at traffic lights !!

[Geordie]

I've always loved the quirkiness of these. I nearly bought a silver 'Meteor' limited edition once. I think that was a K plate too.

[craig1010cc]

Looks a decent daily that I remeber test driving an early 1.4 17 years back (was up at a dealers for £400), went surprisingly well, but did scrape the exhaust a bit as I tried to drive out the dealers with the suspension still in parked

So it would seem that this years Area52 car is the BX following on from the MX5 a couple of years back

[Bioshock]

I crashed a valver into a field once near Cranleigh, going to quick through the twisties .
I kind of imagined that by taking it up to it's maximum height, I'd be able to storm back across the mud and back on to the road. Sadly I was mistaken and had to be towed out by my mate Baz's Fiesta and a very long rope.....

[MrOtter]

Thanks for the interest/comments everyone! Rich, I'll throw the bars in the boot next time I come to A52, might not be for a while though now that I'm back home from Uni for the summer and have no money left!

I've had a closer poke around the car the past couple of days and thought I'd fill you in on some of the finer details/issues.

Firstly, the interior is in pretty good condition, in fact it almost boggles my mind how it can look so nice in there (relatively speaking) after 124,000 miles and 20 years of use. Of course some of the buttons and switches are a bit worn, but they all seem to work which is a good thing! The heater works well too, which is a nice change from the Mini. The trip counter doesn't work, but I'm not really bothered about that yet, and the speedo needle has a very comical wobble which I'm told is normal for these cars, so I know what speed I'm doing within a range of about 10mph. As you can see in the photo, the radio is ancient and it doesn't fit, so I'll try and get something a bit more modern in there so I can at least plug my iPod in; the speakers work (it only has the two in the front doors) but they're not brilliant so maybe one day I'll look at upgrading them, along with maybe finding somewhere for some more speakers in the rear.



As is very common with BXs, the glove box lid has been swapped out due to broken hinges, and the replacement (that happens to be the wrong colour...) is only hanging on with one hinge. The light in there is just laying on its face with no bulb, so I'll chuck one in there and see if it still works sometime (looks like it'll take the same bulb as a Mini number plate lamp).





Blinds still work well on the parcel shelf, although the shelf hinges are both snapped off so it just all falls down whenever you open the boot. I'll need to come up with a fix for that before I start using it every day, or it'll just get annoying and probably break something else...





Seats are oh so comfy, compared to the Mini anyway. The drivers seat backrest angle adjustment is stuck though, in a rather reclined position - the knob on the side of the seat turns one notch backwards or forwards and then gets stuck. Anyone know if this is a common/easy thing to fix? I can't imagine it's that bad, just haven't gotten round to looking at it yet.



Nice bit of fluff for me in the ash tray.



KERCHING! £3.95 in the coin tray! So the car actually cost me £421.05.



Slider missing from the passenger side interior light, maybe a screw driver will work to flick the contact across if it's just turned off...



Rear demist isn't working for some reason...





Anyone know a good way to fix that? Without using a roll of electrical tape preferably!

The car came without a boot carpet, as apparently the old one was mouldy and manky and the previous owner just threw it away. I happened to be helping my girlfriends mum take some things to the tip the other day, and when I saw an old bit of carpet she was going to throw away I knew I could find a home for it.



Okay maybe it's slightly the wrong shade of black, but it's better than no carpet at all right?

I'll make another post soon about the exterior of the car, I took more photos than I thought! Too much excitement about a new gadget (car) to play with!

Thanks for reading

The Otter

[MrOtter]

Now, for the exterior. It's covered in lots of scratches and little dents, which is perfect because then I don't care if anyone in the supermarket car park puts another dent in it There's loads of bits of mould growing on all the exterior plastics, along with a nice chunk of green fuzziness on the underside of the spoiler, but I'm slowly getting rid of that with a bit of vinyl/rubber cleaner. Once I've cleaned up all the plastics I'll have a go with some boiled linseed oil to try and make them a bit black again, gotta hate grey plastic!

The spoiler is devoid of some of its lacquer.



The roof is devoid of almost all its lacquer.



As mentioned previously, it had roof bars on when I bought it. Comically, when I took them off the aerial did this.



It flopped straight on to the roof, as the front roof bar had been keeping it in position It could be propped up completely straight, but it would then just fall over and make you jump when you started driving and heard a tinny smack on the roof.

So, I "fixed" it with some blu tac.





Taking the roof bars off also revealed rather obvious patches where the bars have been on a while, not that it really matters at the moment when the rest of roof looks as bad as it does, but I'll still try and polish them out sometime anyway.



It's got cracked rear light lenses, this one being the worst.



Also, the GB sticker you can see above has turned in to a flaky piece of brittle plastic and looks a bit curse word, so I'll try and get that off sometime. It might mean I need to repaint that satin black part of the panel, but all of the satin black bits around the doors are pretty faded anyway and starting to turn white, so it could do with a bit of a black recoat all over.

Now, a quick look under the bonnet at the only major rust I can find. It's a little flaky on this side, but not too bad.



This side is a bit softer unfortunately.



Yep, that's a hole.



Still, nothing compared to a Mini so I'm not bothered by it at all! A day with the welder should see it looking good as new.

Ooh, a diesel engine...



One other thing to note is that all four tyres are different brands, I've got a Dunlop, a Pirelli, a Firestone, and a Nexen. So one day I might get it an actual matching set of tyres, but they're all legal and they all hold air so it's nothing to worry about for a while.

Well, that's the overview of the car done, the next updates shall be me fixing all the niggly little things. Fun reading huh?

Thanks for reading!

The Otter

[Rich]

the seat adjustment is done via toothed belts. if you unclip the lower seat bolster you can get access to both belts.

[MrOtter]

Rich, cheers for that, always a bit daunting going in to something you have no idea about, so it boosted my confidence a bit when I knew how it worked! I pulled the bottom of the seat apart yesterday and found (after much investigation) that the bar connecting both sides of the seat for adjustment had popped out of the left hand side, so a quick lever bar of the toothed bracket got it working again! Cheers buddy

I bought the BX a few goodies from Halfords last week: some new wiper blades (old ones were completely shot), an air freshener to try and make it not smell like a well used hire car, and some LHM fluid because its bound to empty its own fluid on the floor sooner or later...



I found out when I was changing the wiper blades that the spoiler Citroen decided to fit on the bootlid stops the wiper arm from being hinged upwards to get the blade off, so I had to take the arm off to change the blade. Oh you Frenchies...



Once in a while I randomly go all concourse on something, and the other day I decided I'd try and polish my rear number plate because it was looking a bit faded and cloudy. I stopped halfway through to take a picture for some reason, so that you could see the transformation... (right hand side has been polished here)



When it was raining the other day I decided it'd be a good time to go and sit in the car and see if there were any leaks, so I got in and immediately saw that the passengers side seat and floor where pretty wet. Oh bum. I saw the water was dripping in from the top of A pillar, so it was either windscreen or sunroof. Either way I knew it'd be fiddly to fix properly... Doing a bit of research I found out how sunroofs actually aren't meant to be watertight and that the water is channeled through a drainage system, with a pipe in each corner of the sunroof to take away the water. So what had happened to mine was that the front left drainage channel had become blocked and the water was just building up in the drainage pan until it overflowed in to the car via the sunroof hole - hence I needed to unblock the pipe.

So, my first plan was to be as lazy as possible about it. I drove the car up on to ramps at the back and poured in a bit of drain unblocker (I know it's for household sinks, but a drain is a drain right?) in to the offending corner and let that sit for half an hour (as per the instructions I'll have you know) and then wash it down with some nearly boiling water from the kettle. I had the car on ramps so the solution sat in the front corner rather than draining away out of the back channel.



Of course that didn't work so I then had a water/chemical solution sitting in the corner of the sunroof opening, going nowhere...



I realised I'd have to actually physically unblock the pipe, so firstly I had to actually find the pipe. I started by ripping of pieces of trim (which proved VERY difficult to get back in place...) and having a look.



Here's the pipe!



But where does it go? I followed it down and just about managed to see that it pops through a hole in the side of the door pillar and goes into the pillar box section ready to flow out in to the big wide world. You can just about make it out (the blurry bit) in the back at the bottom of this photo, taken sideways through the fuse box area. Sorry, it was the best I could manage.



With my tiny woman-like hands I managed to get in there and pull the pipe through from the box section and have it hanging out the door, like so.



You can see here about an inch long blockage of black sludge, which eventually made its way out, along with the drain unblocker, when I poked some fish tank airline hose up from the bottom.



What came out wasn't pretty... but now I have all four sunroof drains working as they should! Yay! No more leaks

That's all for now, I had a go at smartening up the dull, faded plastics today so I'll make another post soon about that.

Thanks for reading.

The Otter

[Rich]

Good work buddy! I found that issue with the rear wiper and spoiler too. Annoying, ain't it? A little tip- Bosch wiper blades don't seem to last very long despite being 'premium' product. Track down valeo (oe for citroen) or champion blades. Also, find a friendly local motor factors that can Order you LHM in the future because I've found what halfords charges for it is akin to the main dealer price from castrol LHM+
Sunroofs are also very prone to doing what yours did. Good work unblocking it though, most people don't bother with repairing them and just bodge them closed.

[MrOtter]

Jun 21, 2013 7:08:22 GMT Rich said:

Good work buddy! I found that issue with the rear wiper and spoiler too. Annoying, ain't it? A little tip- Bosch wiper blades don't seem to last very long despite being 'premium' product. Track down valeo (oe for citroen) or champion blades. Also, find a friendly local motor factors that can Order you LHM in the future because I've found what halfords charges for it is akin to the main dealer price from castrol LHM+
Sunroofs are also very prone to doing what yours did. Good work unblocking it though, most people don't bother with repairing them and just bodge them closed.

I'll remember that with the blades when these ones fall apart, cheers

With the LHM, Halfords price goes from £13 to about £4.20 with a trade card I don't even need any yet, it was just that I felt wrong not having any around. Actually from what I can tell, there's actually a smidge too much LHM in the car at the moment, if that yellow disc that's meant to be in between the red rings is to be believed.

Right, only a little update of yesterdays fun, but more progress has been made.

The non functioning seat adjustment was due to the round bar bit of this adjuster on the other side of the seat (that I couldn't photograph because of it being sandwiched against the centre console) popping out of place, so only the right hand side was doing any adjusting. No other pics, but I just used a lever bar to get the bar back in its position/teeth and it works fine again.



Was having a play around with the suspension and thought I'd take a couple of pics with it in ultimate 4x4 attack mode (also known as very high).





I also treated all the exterior plastics to a good clean and de-algae session, as they were covered in little green spots of very hard and baked on nastiness. Once I cleaned them all up I gave everything a going over with some boiled linseed oil (£5 from B&Q) and they came up really nice in my opinion! Unfortunately I didn't take any before shots, but I can guarantee they were much greyer than this.





I also bodged together the interior light with the missing switch, by inserting a piece of metal to bridge the gap that should be being bridged by the switch. It works now, but I will still look out for another interior light sometime to make it look a bit neater rather than having a bit of metal poking out of the light.

That's everything actually up to date now!

Thanks for reading.

[Deleted]

I like the off road stance

[Rich]

LHM level should be checked in the service mode, just in case you didn't already know. Good to hear LHM prices in halfords are cut drastically when a trade card is used. I just never bothered because of its shelf price!