My car reminded me today why I should take better care of it....

[brooksmoses]

This is what I like about this car. 182,000 miles and 14 years since it left the factory (9 of those years and probably most of the miles mine), and it still gets places and back, and when it reminds me to take care of it, it does it in ways that don't leave me stranded.

Such as, yesterday, the grinding noise from the front brakes that prompted me to discover that, when one of the front brake pads not only gets worn down to the rivets, but get worn down past the rivets to bare metal backing, the rivets have made fairly sizable grooves in the rotor....

Clearly I should have checked that a bit more often; sigh. Not that you could see without disassembling the brakes; it was only the inner pad that was gone. The outer one was ... well, ok, the outer one was in no great shape either, but it wasn't completely dead yet.

But, anyhow, my brother came over, and we used almost all of the afternoon to take things apart and put new brake pads and a new rotor on it, and it should be much better now.

And, meanwhile, in my notes to self about things that a car ought to have, I shall put "brake pad thickness meter". Shouldn't be that hard to implement, really....

- Brooks, who notes that there are advantages to being five minutes from the Napa Auto Parts store

Comments

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

Brake thickness pad meter = rivets.

:-p

[brooksmoses]

Heh. Indeed. :)

Now, one just needs to improve the readout -- it ought to be something that's obvious to a driver of the car. Maybe if they included squealer-bits like the brass strips Bill metioned, it would work.....

- Brooks

[wcg.livejournal.com]

For many years Chrysler Corporation put little pieces of soft brass on the edge of disk brake pads, so that when the brake pad was worn down to something like 3/16 inch the brass strips would squeal and warn you that it was time for brake pads. (Being soft brass they didn't hurt the steel disk rotors.)

Of course, people learned that they could pry the strips off with a pair of cutting pliers, and get another 5000 miles use out of the brake pads... This is fine if you remember to buy pads sometime during those 5000 miles, and set a time aside for changing the pads, deglazing the rotors, repacking the wheel bearings, etc... But as you can guess, it often led to exactly the problem you had yesterday.

Since you mentioned that only the inner pad had worn that badly, my old Ford master mechanic's brain[1] kicked into high gear and I'm wondering if you have a brake caliper piston that is sticking. That's a pretty common symptom. Would you make a point of checking your brake wear in about 5000 miles, and seeing if the pads are wearing evenly, please? If the inside pad is wearing excessively, you'll want to be looking for a new caliper for that side (or a rebuilt one), since I doubt you have access to a machine shop where you could properly rebuild your own caliper.

1. I won the North Texas District competition for Ford Motor Company dealership mechanics in 1985 and 1986. It was called the Ford Certified Training Program then, though I have no idea what it's called today. But I really am qualified to sew the "Master Mechanic" patch on my sleeve.

[brooksmoses]

Thanks for the advice! I'll definitely make a point of checking the pad wear.

On this setup, though (1988 full-size Bronco), it looks to me like the caliper should float side-to-side, so that a stuck piston would cause wear, but the caliper ought to still slide over so that the wear's balanced. But that's theory, and not practice; I'll bow to actual practical knowledge. *grin*

Anyhow, as I said, it should be much better now, but that doesn't mean it's completely fixed -- when I got it all back together (mostly by flashlight, as it was getting dark), I noticed that it's still sticking such that I can feel a significant bit of friction turning the wheel by hand, and it gets a lot worse (although still turnable with my hands on the wheel studs) if I pump the brakes a few times. Besides which, the inner grease seal was clearly going bad, and the parts store was closed by the time I got things apart to the point of realizing this, so it needs to come apart again anyhow so I can put that in. The current plan is that sometime before the end of next weekend I'll get a new grease seal and take it back apart to install that, and clean out the caliper slide surfaces in the process.

And, if that doesn't fix it, I'll just go ahead and get a new caliper. No point in waiting 5000 miles to check the pad wear, if it's bad enough to where I can feel it dragging, I imagine.

- Brooks