Vintage Thing No.44 - The Citroen C15D

If you want a truly recreational vehicle, you could do a lot worse than one of these. This is my 1986 Citroen C15D van, known to other members of my family as Mighty Whitey. It's old enough now to qualify for classic insurance but for the last 14 years has been my principal vehicle. During that time I've had engines, motorbikes, a lathe, a coal bunker and a Shetland pony in the back but not all at the same time. I’ve camped in it, too, visiting various parts of the UK but also France, Holland and Belgium. If I put the passenger seat fully forward, there’s just enough space for me lie diagonally across the load space. On an inflatable mattress, I sleep incredibly well in it.

It’s just an ordinary panel van really but, whereas all those designer SUVs are too specialised to be useful only as fashion statements, for versatility nothing can touch Mighty Whitey.

My van has acquired many names over the years. It was fleeting known as Oilio Eglasias because it came from Spain, was a little bit oily but was a big hit with the ladies because whenever they needed something moving they suddenly found me and my van very attractive. Or maybe it was just me…

I usually call it The Funbus because so many good times have become associated with it over the years.

Travelling on the continent was interesting. I kept getting waved at. It seemed anyone who was anyone drove one in rural France. In the spirit of “cordial intent” I would wave back but by then my new friends would have had realised that I was on the wrong side of the car. Their happy expressions would change as they realised their conspicuously absent friend was not driving and that my van must have been out of control with a grinning waving loon in the passenger seat. That’s what passed over their previously happy faces at any rate. But by then my van had inexplicably negotiated the next corner and I had crashed out of their lives.

My C15D runs on a sniff of diesel and rarely lets me down. I’ve restored it once already, even though Champs (as they were latterly called) were being given away free at that time by certain commercial vehicle dealers if you bought a bigger van. You drove off in your brand new Iveco, thought it was a bit sluggish, got home, opened the rear doors and there was your free C15D inside, its long armed mirrors on the doors tucked in neatly and bearing a “With Compliments” sticker on the windscreen.

Doing it up made no economic sense whatsoever but it was mine, I knew its history and it had made itself indispensable.

My van has been in the same family since new. It was bought by my aunt, Margaret Turner, brand new in 1986 from Arnold’s of Penryn in Cornwall. Here she is visiting her friend Molly in Wales. Her van retained the dealer sticker in the back window for many years – the address was given as Falmoth. Of course it should have been Falmouth but phonetically I don’t suppose you could argue.

Auntie Margaret was well on the way to restoring my grandparents’ 300 year old house when she bought her C15D. She worked with blind people, teaching them Braille and handicrafts, and often had to drive them around. To this end she had a folding seat and seat belts fitted to the rear. I’ve kept these although the outside folding step was removed when I fitted a tow bar. She would come home from work and do a little light blockwork or plastering in the evenings. She’s a far better carpenter than I will ever be. Her C15D became a significant part of her tool kit and in recognition of its abilities it was she who christened it Mighty Whitey.

In 1995, she decided something a little bigger would be a good idea and bought a Nissan Vanette. I jumped at the chance to buy her C15D as it only had 48,000 miles on the clock. It’s now coming up to 190,000 miles but that’s nothing. One of the local farms had a Peugeot 205 van and that got up to 305,000 miles on the same 1.7 XUD engine before it was written off in an accident.

The 60bhp (43.5 kW) 80mm x 88mm 1769cc diesel engine is a real world interpretation of perpetual motion. It’s an all iron design that’s tilted to the rear, in typical Peugeot fashion, by 30 degrees. It has a belt drive to single overhead camshaft, a compression ratio of 23:1 and a five bearing crank and the fuel injection systems were either by Bosch or Lucas/CAV/Roto-diesel. Mine is one of the latter.

The Vintage Thing-ness of this engine already been recognised by dint of having its own Haynes manual. This means that my van is the only vehicle I own that needs two manuals, the other one being that which covers the Visa range. As usual with Haynes manuals, there’s a good deal of “Referring to Section 12” but through constantly flicking between both manuals there are oily fingerprints on all the pages. The 1905cc engine has an 83mm bore and a 23.5:1 compression ratio (same head bigger bore) but doesn't put out much more power at 65 bhp (47 kW)but has more torque at 87 lb ft (118Nm) instead of 81 lb ft (110Nm).

On introduction in 1984, there was a 48 bhp 72mm x 69mm 1124cc petrol engine offered but the C15E (E for “essence”) was never as popular in Britain and faded away quietly in the eighties. I haven’t seen one for ages. Some early C15Es had the 70mm x 62mm 954cc engine but the later ones had the 75mm x 77mm 1360cc engine from the Citroen AX. C15Es were recognisable by their three stud wheels but are probably extinct by now. No, the place for the 1360cc AX engine was in the AX, and preferably in injected form.

The diesel version is the vehicle that established Citroen's reputation as a commercial vehicle manufacturer in Britain. Before that there were the 2Cv & Citroen Dyane based vans, the AK400 and the Acadienne, but these were hardly mainstream vehicles. The corrugated panel H vans and the slightly more conventional C25 were rarely seen on this side of the channel.

But with the C15, Citroen were onto a winner - thousands of motor factors up and down this sceptred isle couldn't be wrong. Who cares that the C15 drew heavily from the Peugeot parts bin? There was no Peugeot equivalent. The Peugeot 205 van had a much smaller carrying capacity and the 305 van did not offer the same load height but was a much sleeker design. I reckon the product planners at Peugeot felt they may have missed a trick by not offering a Pug version, a mistake they did not repeat with the Citroen Berlingo and Peugeot Partner.

Obviously based on the Citroen Visa range – again a case of Peugeots in disguise – the C15s were what David Browne, one of my Industrial Design lecturers, called “good, honest little vans.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Front suspension was conventional coil sprung McPherson struts while the rear design owed much to the Citroen BX albeit with steel springs. With a longer wheelbase and a conventional disc/drum brake system, the chassis featured nothing that might put off the hard nosed fleet buyer. The great beauty of the C15D lies in its rugged simplicity.

A smart marketing move on introduction was the Van Rouge/Van Blanc limited edition. You could have any colour so longs as it was red or white and each choice came with the logo of a bottle of wine on wheels placed above the front and rear screens. “Van Rouge or Van Blanc,” ran the ad headline, “but definitely not van ordinaire!”

Julian Marsh has some web pages on C15s and Champs including a Van Rouge/Van Blanc brochure.

Most C15s come in white and so have contributed to the “White Van” myth where nothing is faster on the road than a white van, no matter what you’re driving and how hard you try. White vans are a symbol of contracted-out services where no-one is wholly responsible and they are generally driven by “White Van Man” (Homo sapiens cowboi urbanus) who lacks social skills and to whom the Highway Code does not apply. With only 60 bhp in even its most powerful form, I think the C15 is probably the acceptable face of the “White Van.”

Being mistaken for tradesman is part and parcel of driving a C15. I once parked in St Cleer near where I live and an old man came hurrying out of his house and said “Thanks heavens you’re here! There’s water everywhere!” It was raining at the time so we were at cross purposes for at least the first half of the ensuing exchange but in the end he narrowed his eyes and said “You are Mr Pote the plumber aren’t you?” Looking back, I could have offered to help but I think I did the right thing by revealing my true identity. It would have been like that scene from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em where Frank Spencer, who is working as a gas man, visits a house. A few seconds after entering, it blows up and out of the smoke emerges Frank and the householder with blackened faces. “Well,” says Frank, “I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.”

The original payload was 500kg with a useable volume of 2,66m³ but Payload is either 600kg or 765kg. Although a 1986 model, so dating from the first year of availability in the UK, my example is just too young to be a proper “Van Blanc” (do any of these survive, I wonder?). Due to tax regulations, UK models were supplied with the side windows everyone else got filled in with a flat panel of steel that always rusted quickly. I subsequently had windows fitted and the improvement to visibility was dramatic, especially at acute angle junctions.

My machine has a four speed box, where most have a five speed, and a single rear door. Apparently, a firm in France called Enac recognised the fact that these single doors were prone to sagging and being caught by the wind and offered a two door conversion soon after the C15 was launched. The factory soon noticed and after a couple of years the two door variety was introduced and standardised. My rear door did get a bit bent by the wind once at St Agnes when the door restraint was snapped with the force but I unbent it without too much trouble. Some people have remarked upon it, wondering if I have done the conversion myself. I really like it as it reminds me of the custom single rear doors you would sometimes see on Mini and Escort vans.

Citroen facelifted the C15D in 1989, incorporating the indicators in the front bumpers and sprucing up the interior. From then on very little changes were made to the range since it was clearly such a success. The only impact from the introduction of the Berlingo range was the use of the newer van’s more modern 1868cc engine that subsequently conformed with Euro 3 emissions standards. Power steering came in from 1994 and the option of petrol engines on the continent ended in 1998, by which time everyone in the UK had practically forgotten they’d ever existed. Goodness knows when the tooling and development costs were recouped but the old wagon just kept on selling. When production ended at the end of 2005, 1,181,471 had been built at the Vigo plant in Spain with assembly plants in Morocco and Poland.

Something similar is still in production in China. The Fukang ZX N 15 is based on the Citroen ZX and is very much a more modern interpretation of the C15D although the recently introduced Citroen Nemo looks much flasher.

In fits of enthusiasm for my old van, I sometimes contemplate souping it up but this last long because this would compromise its reliability and usefulness. I have enough projects without Mighty Whitey becoming another one. It was interested to hear about the 16 valve BX powered version of Barry and Robert Lowdell for this must be the ultimate C15 and a marvellous street sleeper. Unfortunately, it recently succumbed to rust but will rise gain soon.

When I restored it before, I found very bad corrosion in the rear suspension subframe. There was also wear in the rear suspension arms giving my van a knock kneed look when viewed from the rear. I investigated doing the work myself but found that a Sykes-Pickavant coil spring compressor for the horizontal springs cost something like ₤450. Then one of my neighbours suggested paying a visit to the local vehicle salvage yard and we found a fairly new motor factor's van that had been written off. It was also in top of a Metro so undoing the subframe bolts and removing the whole axle was a much easier and cheaper solution.

The brakes have always been a bit "wooden", even from new. As a private owner van, it often runs quite light and I use lower rear tyre pressures (30 psi instead of the recommended 36psi) than a heavily laden van would need. There is a pressure limiting device in the braking system that stops the brakes locking up if unladen but I remember once sliding to a halt facing the edge once in an emergency stop when I borrowed it from Auntie Margaret a few years after she bought it new. Since then I think the pressure limiting device has had more to do and more varying loads - Mighty Whitey often carries more weight and the rear wheels haven't locked up since then.

But I still don't like the way they "feel". A recent new master cylinder, discs, pads and various servo pumps haven't made much difference.

The brakes and the lack of a tacho (I like seeing my engine speed) are about the only things that displease me mildly. And I'm investigating fitting a tacho.

Over the winter, I embarked on a second bout of welding on Mighty Whitey. My repairs from 2002 were still sound but in many places the metal that I’d welded to had succumbed to rust. The longitudinal members under the rear floor were particularly bad but by going in from above I avoided dropping the rear subframe. From now on I shall Waxoyl regularly although my C15D is sort of semi-retired and won’t be covering anything like the same sort of mileages. Many panels are joined by a curious kind of rubbery mastic that also serves as under body sealer and sound insulation and, if you set fire to it by welding close by, it makes horrible fumes. I always wear a respirator under my welding visor anyway but the outer filters go black really quickly.

A few years ago, whilst chatting to the MoT man, I learnt that the trade check the bulkheads for corrosion. Since then I had oiled what I could see but although this has worked investigations revealed problems around the door hinges that could only be addressed by taking off the wings and doors. The upper corners of the engine bay were particularly awkward to get at but I hacked away good metal and was able to weld these sections in again afterwards, once I’d replaced the inaccessible bits.

More recently, I’ve replaced the clutch. Reverse has been difficult to get, literally for years, and when I’d reached the end of the adjustment I created a longer adjusting rod, knowing that this was not a permanent solution. It seems that the tension on the diaphragm fingers was gradually going and reverse, which lacks synchromesh, would sometimes protest when I attempted to engage it. This was the signal to get out and get under and re-adjust it but, when the gearbox suddenly began to gnash its teeth just after the van got its MOT, I bit the bullet and decided to replace the clutch. I already had a clutch kit in my stores - that's the advantage of owning a vehicle for a long time, the spare parts tend to find you when you don't need them. When you do need them, they can be quite elusive.

On separating the gearbox from the engine, it was obvious that I'd had all my money's worth out of the pressure plate. It wouldn't have been long before it failed completely. Many of the inner ends of the diaphragm fingers were missing completely.

This was the clutch that featured in my log entry on the Blackman Black Museum recently.

The clutch had become incredible heavy – something I’d come to accept over the years – and I noticed that under pressure the bulkhead was moving in and out like someone’s chest breathing when I depressed the clutch. Pulling away the sound absorbing material on the bulkhead revealed no cracks but in the interests of better pedal pressure I mad a small bracket that bolted onto the pedal box mounting points and fed these loads into the inner wing. It doesn’t move any more.

Along with a new air filter, these changes have transformed the way my old van drives and I’m already planning some more camping expeditions in the summer – probably being mistaken for a tradesman along the way.