Coming up in this post: endless moaning, little bit of ranting, some mildy repressed rage. Bring tea. Or vodka, I did.
Managed to get home slightly early today so I thought I'd look into the brake squeal that's been developing over the last few days. I initially expected pads as whilst the current ones are only 18 months or around 12000mi old they were Bargain Basement Eichers, so I grabbed a new set from ECP during their (eternal) sale.
Don't you just love it when a simple 30 minute job of changing brake pads turns into a 4 hour farce? I attribute all of this, every single second of delay, to trivial cost-cutting and bad design. Obviously, the first step in brake pad change is to jack the car up and get the wheels off. I'm not going to complain about the silly crease jacking point that inevitably gets bent by every garage who throw it on a lift or just use a flat jack pad - promise. I am definitely going to complain about having to use a 4ft breaker bar to get the lug nuts loose though, that sucked. God bless lazy fitters with air impact guns
Anyway, car was up, bolts were loose, but would the wheel come off? Would it hell.
Okay, fair enough common problem. I'll just give it a bit of a lovetap at 3 and 9 and it will pop free? Nope.
Okay, rubber mallet? Nope.
Hmm, righto, swift kicks to to top of the wheel then? Nope.
WD40 and a repeat of the above? Nope.
2x4 and 5lb lump hammer from the back of the wheel? Nope.
Dropping it from the max jack height with nuts loosened? Yeah, no.
Driving it down the street with nuts loosened? Nope (and stupid).
Impressive, right? Who said the French surrender easily?!
After far too damn long I gave up (now who's the surrender monkey) and took it to my local garage who spend the next 30 minutes using an acetylene torch on the mating lip. Even after that it took some serious hits from a 10lb hammer to break them free. With them free I was quite surprised to see that beyond the usual corrosion mating the lip on the hub to the steel wheel, the hub had also mated itself with the back of the steel which was contributing to the sticking.
At this point I made use of their airtools to clean the hub, inner face of the wheel and that mating lip up. To be honest I had to, couldn't get the wheel to sit back flush on the hub the corrosion was that bad. The mating surfaces then got slavered in coppaslip to hopefully prevent that happening again any time soon. So, around 2 hours to remove two wheels, magnificent. Would have been a proper pain in the rear if, say, I'd gotten a flat...luckily for me that came later...
You can still just about see the places the steelie had welded itself to the hub with corrosion. Eagle eyed will also notice the disk retaining screw is missing, need to find one of those.
So back at home and, onto the actual job at hand then. Internet says the caliper bolts are 13mm. I suppose they might have been once, but when I got to them they had so much corrosion on them that the 14mm head barely got on them. Broke out my rotary tool and wire wheeled them for a good little while until they started looking like a hexagon again. In their self-defense, once cleaned up, they functioned as they were meant to.
The caliper slider pins however, decided now was a good time to act up. Turns out corrosion on the caliper meant that the flat section of the slider pins was not sitting in the groove it was meant to, and so nothing stopped it spinning freely when turning the caliper bolt. Channel locks to the rescue, and the bolt came loose.
Here's the old pads and hardware. The squeal could be explained by those crusty shims, the shims being partially detached/moved, or by the rusty hardware prevent the pads from moving easily. Surprisingly my initial expectation of low pad material was wrong, with 3.5mm or so left. Still, that's hardly a lot and I can't live with a squeal so in the bin they went.
Yet more corrosion where the hardware sits. Also a possibly contributor - a definite contributor to the sticky brake on the nearside though. Wire brushed, then wheeled, and the new hardware installed:
PSA: Always buy new hardware. Costs what, £4-5 on sale at places like ECP? Saves a lot of hassle and improves longevity.
Standard, expected, new v old.
More corrosion, pot was terrible. Now this is entirely down to rubbish design. With pads installed the pad sits slightly lower than the top of the pot (you can see this in the pic with the old pads, look at where the circle of the piston pot sits). This means it is permanently exposed to water/dirt/crap - especially the caliper being mounted facing the front of the car. Genius PSA, genius. Wire wheeled, bit of coppaslip (if to do nothing but try and stop it welding itself to the shim).
With those installed, all I had to do was install the new bolts (14mm this time, odd) and repeat on the other side. Other side was slightly better, no issues with spinning slider bolts this time so this side actually took the expected 15 minutes or less
.
At this point I decided to tackle another example of cost-cutting that had started to become a real eyesore. The mudguards. For whatever reason, in their infinite infallible wisdom, PSA decided to make the mounting bracket for the mudguards from metal - but not just any metal, 1.5mm thick (apparently) mild steel which was seemingly then not given any sort of protection...
A few months (let alone a decade) later, where once you had a shiny clean mudguard bracket you now have this:
Best part is, its an entirely visible part - its not hidden or masked in anyway whatsoever and has a real tendency to catch your (my) eye. I couldn't wire wheel it, as it would just vanish, cant replace it, and I cant even remove it as the bloody screws securing it have stripped. So, whats the next best... yes okay, the next cheapest and laziest method? Wire brush and some Hammerite.
Got another coat after this pic, and will probably get another next time I'm working on the lemon. Definitely better, not as much of an eyesore. Should really have done the retaining clips and the other screw shouldn't I? Ah well, did I mention it was a lazy approach?
With what limited time I had left I decided to clean the windows. Now that we have a bit of sunlight in the afternoons I'd noticed that the front screen was deplorable. Covered in smudge marks and water spots....yes, really. When this heap suffers a leaky boot in winter it actually gets a frozen windscreen on the inside too (will have to find an old vid my sis sent). That, combined with no a/c, meant lots and lots of water spots. Here is the result from just the front windscreen - you don't even want to see what the rear window side looked like once all the dog nose-art had been eradicated.
And that was all for today. 30 mins into 4 hours because of cost cutting and crap design. Oh, and the flat thing I made a jibe at earlier? Happened on the way home from some errands, at least the wheel came off this time! Hooray.
Yummy hole
Tasty rust
Delicious centre section
Jacked
Zorst in boot
)I gave the clamp a bit of a love tap and the bolt dropped out, then a bit of poking with a flathead screwdriver to break away some of the rust and it is out with the old.
V-band during
Woeful v-band
New v-band
New zorst on
Exhaust rust
Exhaust rust
