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

[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.