a photoblog of what i did today.....

[classicman]

Very nice work Chris.

I'm envious of your drill press. I couldn't afford (space nor room) a stand alone, so I bought a tabletop model. Its great and all, but too many times I find I cannot use it on certain things as the distance between the bit and the shelf is too limiting.

[glatt]

We bought a used car a couple weeks ago, and knew when we got it that the brakes were pretty worn and would need to be replaced soon. So at around 2PM Saturday, I realized I had a beautiful 4.5 hour empty window until we were meeting friends for dinner. I stopped in the auto parts store and bought new brake pads.

I got home and switched the cars in the driveway and my son and I proceeded to take the front wheel off the driver's side. I went to install the new pads, but they didn't fit! So back to the store to exchange them. This time with an old pad in hand to make sure I had the right ones before I left. I got a knowledgeable clerk this time and everyone was extremely apologetic that they gave me the wrong part initially.

Now I was feeling a little pressure, somehow I had only 2 hours now, and still needed to take a shower. I did the driver's side brakes with no problem, and figured the passenger's side would be even faster. Except I couldn't get two of the five lug nuts off. I sprayed them several times with WD40 and then got cleaned up and went to dinner with the friends.

So Sunday morning, I went out there and tried again. The lug nuts wouldn't budge. So I heated them with a propane torch, and they still wouldn't budge. Finally, I decided to use more muscle than I thought I should. And I snapped them both clean off! I would have been pissed if I was on the side of the road, but this was a controlled environment and I was happy to get the wheel off.

So my photoblog begins with this picture.

See the three nice wheel stud bolts and the two broken ones? This will not do. Let's fix it.

First we remove the brake caliper piston assembly thing and hang it by a bent coat hanger from one of the giant springs holding up the car. We're hanging it because the line full of brake fluid is too weak to hold up this big and heavy hunk of metal and I don't want to have to mess with replacing brake fluid and bleeding air out of the system, so I just leave the whole thing attached to the brake fluid lines. But I want it out of the way, so I hang it up.


Next comes the pads. They are old and worn, so I pull them out of the brake mount assembly. I want to save them for now because I'll need to reuse the shims in a bit.



The old pads next to the new ones.

[glatt]

Next I want to take the brake assembly thing off. It's in the way of getting the brake disk (or brake rotor) off. There are two huge bolts in the back that I have to remove to get this off. They were pretty tight, so I got a mallet to bang on the wrench handle to get those bolts out. Off it came. This one we can just set aside.


Now we can remove the brake rotor easily. It just falls right off.


Here's the wheel hub with the two broken studs. I want to pound them out with a hammer, but there's not much sticking out to hit. I need a nail set or something. Also, look at that thin sheet metal splash guard thing behind the wheel hub. It's so close to the hub, the only way I can get a new wheel stud bolt in there is to line each hole up with that little notch.


And after digging through a junk drawer, I found the perfect thing to pound these old broken studs out. An old door hinge pin. It has a nice large head that I can't miss with my hammer blows, and it's nice and strong.


I couldn't take a picture while swinging the hammer, but the broken studs came out easily.

[glatt]

I couldn't rotate the wheel stud to get those holes to line up with the notch in the sheet metal splash guard so I could get the new stud bolts in, so I put the transmission into neutral.

Now I can easily rotate the hub by hand, and lined the first hole up with the notch.


This is one of the new wheel stud bolts. Some guy in a Youtube video said that putting them in the freezer would shrink them very slightly and make it just a little easier to install them. I figured it couldn't hurt, so that was the first thing I had done in the morning. Notice how the bolt gets fatter and is ridged just before you get to the head. The hole is smaller than those ridges, and when you pull or hit the bolt into place it just jams into the hole and is held there by the friction in that ridged area.


And this is the bolt inserted partway into the hole. I still need to get it in another half inch.

[glatt]

I could try to swing a hammer back there and pound the bolt in, but that seemed to lack elegance. So I decided to pull the bolt in instead.

I stacked a bunch of oversized washers and put one of the new lug nut on backwards so the flat part of the lug nut would rub against the washers. This worked great at first, but when I started to apply actual force to the wrench, the whole wheel hub started to rotate.


So I got a long pry bar and slipped it between two wheel stud bolts and against the ground. That locked the wheel hub in place so I could apply some force and pull that new wheel stud bolt into place. It worked beautifully.


Here's the first new stud snug in the hole! The second one was even easier because I knew the routine now.


And I cleaned and sanded the brake rotor a little to get rid of some of the glazing on the surface. There were no deep ridges at all, so I could reuse it without resurfacing it.


Oh, hey. This is a good picture where you can see the piston in the background. It's that silvery looking cup with the rubber gasket surrounding it. It's sticking out pretty far. As the old pads had worn down, it pushed out farther and farther. I'll need to compress it to make room for the new thicker pads to be installed.

[glatt]

Now I put the brake mount assembly back. This thing must have a real name, but I don't know it off the top of my head. It just holds all the brake stuff in place. It was hard to get this off, so I figured I should put it back on just as tightly. So I pounded the handle of the wrench with a mallet a little to snug up those bolts. If I had a torque wrench, I could put it back to the exact specs, but I don't, so I do my best. It's not falling off.


Under the hood is the master brake cylinder. You can see the fluid level is a little low. That's because all that fluid is down in the caliper piston that got extended so far when the brake pads wore down.

I use a clamp to squeeze the piston back into place.

And now look at the fluid level. It's higher. We had been getting an intermittent brake warning light when we went up and down hills, and I think that was caused by the low levels of fluid in master cylinder dipping below the sensor there. Now that the level is higher, I expect that light won't be coming on again.

[glatt]

We're almost there!

I took the shims off the old worn pads and I cleaned them with brake cleaner. Then I lined up the new pads and shims and lubricated them with special high temperature brake lube. This keeps the brakes from squealing. You DON'T lubricate the braking surface of the pads, you lubricate the rear of the pads. Then if they move around a millimeter or two against the caliper when braking, they won't make any noise. So spread that grease around with my finger and then stack the shims onto the backs of the brake pads.


Put the pads in place in the brake mount assembly. There are some clips at the contact points that hold them snugly in place.

Now you can take the hanging caliper part off the coat hanger and put that over the pads and bolt that on. Make sure to remove the coat hanger from the springs. That will make a racket if you drive around with that up in there.

And put the wheel on.


Pump the pedal a few times, and go for a test drive! It stops perfectly and no squeals or anything. Doesn't pull to either side when I brake and no pulsation or vibrations or anything.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by glatt

First we remove the brake caliper piston assembly thing and hang it by a bent coat hanger from one of the giant springs holding up the car. We're hanging it because the line full of brake fluid is too weak to hold up this big and heavy hunk of metal and I don't want to have to mess with replacing brake fluid and bleeding air out of the system, so I just leave the whole thing attached to the brake fluid lines. But I want it out of the way, so I hang it up.

In the interest of full disclosure. The brakes seemed fine to me after pumping the pedals a lot to seat the calipers and going for a test drive, but when I gave the car to my wife, she thought the pedal was really soft and the brakes were bad. She had a scare when the car didn't stop the way she was expecting. I listened to her description of what happened, and realized the pedal was indeed pretty soft. My pumping them initially had masked the problem when I was testing the car.

Somehow I must have gotten air or contaminants in the line when I pushed the pistons back in with a C-clamp.

I've since read that it's better to bleed off the brake fluid when pushing the piston back in rather than pushing all the fluid back up to the master cylinder.

Anyway, that meant I needed to bleed the brakes to try to get the air out of the system. And I figured that as long as I was bleeding the brakes, I might as well put a lot of fluid in and basically flush them. So that's what I did over the weekend. Didn't take any pictures, because there's nothing to take a picture of. You just open a valve at the right rear wheel, have someone pump the brakes with the engine off, and then close the valve, and tell them to take their foot off the brake. Repeat about 8 times, and then add fluid to the master cylinder. Repeat that cycle for about 20 minutes until all new fluid is coming out at the RR wheel, and you don't see any bubbles in your bleeder tube. Then bleed the left rear wheel, and then right front wheel, and then left front wheel.

It's tedious and takes an hour and requires a helper. But the helper can go inside and watch the Giants beat the Redskins while you are putting the wheels back on and taking the next one off and getting your clear tube in place and inserted in your bottle. They only need to come out to pump the pedal for a few minutes at a time.

So add about $15 in brake fluid to the job. And $2 for a clear plastic tube. And I had to buy an offset wrench to reach the bleeder valve on the rear brakes, because the brake drum lip was in the way of my regular wrench, and the single wrench was sold out, so I had to buy a set for $22.

So add $40 to the job, but it also resulted in a brake line flush.

My wife is very pleased with the brakes now. And I'm glad she can stop the car when she needs to.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by glatt

Somehow I must have gotten air or contaminants in the line when I pushed the pistons back in with a C-clamp.

Not necessarily you're fault, it could have already been contaminated. You were smart to push as much new fluid into the system as you could, fresh fluid never hurts.