peejay

WHEW.... I finally figured a way of getting the caliper off of the slide (it was so simple you'll laugh) and after I fixed that, I realized the piston wouldn't retract either. After wrestling for 30 minutes getting the piston out, I throoughly cleaned all of the rust out of the bore (all on the non-fluid side of the seal, will explain later) cleaned up the piston on the wire-wheel, cleaned the rust crud off of the dust boot and off of the piston seal, cleaned it all better than surgically clean, lubed it all thoroughly with brake fluid, put the caliper back together, put the caliper back on, bled it... AMAZING! Now the brake actually released when you let off the brakes. No more pulling hard to the left, no more smoke curling out from the left front wheel, no more brake dust all over the side of the car... and no $50 for a rebuilt caliper either!

riffraff

sweet... now go and drive the **** out of her

crazy dog

Nice job PeeJay! I need to put brakes on mine but the weather is too nice now. I guess I'll just have to get a 12 pack and have at it.

crazy dog

the brake job that is!

error402

Sweet! I'm looking at replacing my brakes too. Good to hear that you fixed your problem with relatively little effort.

peejay

Yah... now that I have more time to explain...

It was the left front caliper. It was like WELDED to the top slide. I was beating on it with a long chisel and a hammer, nothing was working. The problem was that the pad carrier is bolted to glorified sheet metal, so hitting with a hammer was just causing that to flex. This morning I was thinking, "Man, it would be great if I had some sort of puller, like a gear puller...." Then I realized hey, I *do* have a gear puller! So i go out there and have at it.

The gear puller idea didn't work. The fingers kept popping off of the caliper. Then I decided, screw it, the caliper is coming off, so I unbolted the whole carrier/caliper assembly and looked at it on the ground. At that point it was crystal clear - just set the caliper on the ground, get a long punch, and hammer the slide down out of the caliper. It came out with only 4 hits.

Then I unthreaded the slide from the pad carrier, chucked it up in a drill, added some lube, and used the slide to clean out the slide hole in the caliper. It worked 90% of the way. The last 10% was a no-go because somebody was hammering on the caliper to push it back down on the slide so he could at least drive if he didn't touch the footbrake Grabbed the drill bits and drilled out the boogered-up part (I think it was a 29/64" bit) and used the bit to kinda taper the ends. Now the slide moved freely.

Then I had to wrestle with getting the piston out. I threaded the brake hose back on and pumped the brakes. Piston barely moving. I bled the air out (tricky when the caliper's not attached to anything) and pumped the pedal like a madman. After a LONG time it finally popped out. I have never rebuilt a caliper before today Plus I didn't have a rebuild kit. The problem was, there's a little ledge between the main seal and the dust boot that was totally rusted up, which was binding against the piston. I wire-wheeled the piston and dunked it into a sink full of hot water. I carefully removed the dust boot (there is a tricky clip) and VERY CAREFULLY removed the piston seal. Then I used a Dremel bit (sanding flap) in my trusty cordless electric drill to remove the rust, then used a wire wheel bit to remove the rust from inside the piston seal area. Then I went and rinsed it all out thoroughly with scalding hot water and set it outside to dry in the sun. Then I carefully removed all of the rust crud from the seal and the dust boot. I just used my fingers to clean the dust boot, holding it underwater, but for the piston seal I used a clean lint-free paper towel soaked in brake fluid. It had no tears or nicks.

Putting it together was really fun... The piston seal only goes in one way. One edge is slightly thicker than the other. Consulting my manuals, none of them said which way it was supposed to go! So I racked my brain and decided that the slightly thicker end goes towards the fluid side. I'm pretty sure that's what they said in brakes class... Then thoroughly lubed the seal, the caliper bore, and the piston (which was dried in the sun and inspected for lint/hairs/etc.) with clean brake fluid, popped it in 1/2way, put the dust boot on the piston, then pushed the piston in all the way and set the boot into its grove in the caliper. Now the really tricky part - putting the retainer clip back in. But it went in eventually. Slapped it all back together, bled the brakes, no leaks, tried to turn the rotor, spun easily... hey vern I think it's fixed!