Last Saturday night in Chicago, Citroën owners got together to celebrate Andy Daley and Mark Deven’s establishment of storage and repair garage for their SMs. Located just southwest of O’Hare Airport the facility, known as Chi-Town Citroën provides adequate space for Andy to already undertake the restoration of two other SM’s. I was in Chicago and invited to the “official” opening. In fact Andy picked me up at my hotel in his 1971 D Special. What a treat!
View a photo gallery of the event here!
We had pizza, beer and snacks to munch on and the conversation was lively about a vast number of Citroën related topics. One in particular was a picture shown of a home made refurbishment of DS brake pads. They were re-surfaced with wood! After a bit of testing it was determined that walnut was the preferred choice over pine. (Pine got too gooey when the brake pads got hot.) NOTE: We are not suggesting you should even be considering this for your car. Though admittedly the person using them said that he leaves a lot of distance between car when driving and plans for a leisurely stopping distance at anything over 50 mph. To his credit through, he said that wear indicator wires had been embedded in the wood. I wondered if there was also a smoke detector fitted in the engine bay?
Andy had 2 SM engines torn down to have the heads overhauled (by David Hume) and have the blocks and cranks cleaned, inspected and overhauled. We have a technical article on the latest and surprisingly inexpensive SM chain tensioning that you can find here.
Andy also had a few friends who were Porsche owners stop by with two looking to make a Citroën purchase! All in all a fun night and a great way to pass the Ides of March by injecting some Citroën enthusiasm.