[Shotimes] Dodged yet ANOTHER bullet yesterday....was: Brakes...was: ......

[George Fourchy]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 11:02:31 -0700, George Fourchy wrote:

>And...speaking of THAT.....Lowrider saved my bacon yet ANOTHER time yesterday
>morning......

I put all new Wilwood calipers and rotors on the Lowrider the week before the
convention.  I forgot about the HPS pads that Kirk sent me, and used the original
tan pads.  Duhh!!~  Anyway, everything (almost) was new, and I had been having rotor
warping problems before this, so I figured it was the old calipers I'd had for 4
years.  Besides, the new ones are pretty, right?

So, I needed to season the rotors and bed the pads, OK?  Well, I tried to season the
rotors first, using the Baer website someone posted on the list.  That's a great set
of instructions.  So I 'sorta' seasoned the rotors on the freeway, but for one
reason or aonther, usually traffic, I didn't get it fully done.  But the rotors were
more or less OK....the pads still needed bedding.  That never got done prior to
Thunderhill, so I figured, well, it'll happen here.  The tan pads did their thing,
fading bad all the time.  I used Josh's pads, which were certainly seasoned already,
and they were fine.  So then on Friday and Saturday, after the convention, I install
the HPS pads I should have put in before.

So it's time to bed them.  They work VERY well for street use, in town, and for rush
hour on the freeway.  But I still need to BED them, like Thunderhill would have.  So
yesterday morning, after my mid shift, I'm going home from Oakland to sleep.  I-80
is empty, like it is every Sunday morning at 6 am.  So, in the vicinity of the hotel
in Vallejo, I make the first hard stop from 65 to 5 mph.  It's fine...they fade a
tiny bit near the end.  I speed back up and do it again.  This time, I get down to
about 30 mph, and suddenly the car swerves to the left, and the pedal goes to the
floor.  Freeway's empty....no problem.  At first, I thought it was the antilock, but
it wasn't.  I now have no brakes.  Every time I push the pedal, it goes to the
floor.  There is a bit of braking at first, then none.

So I limp 18 more miles to home....CD player is on, but I don't hear it.  What could
it be?  The speedbleeders might have popped.  A piston seal might have failed.  A
brake line might have split.  The master cylinder might have failed....it's the
original one with 
273+K miles.  How much is THIS going to cost?  Etc...etc....etc.

I have to run a flashing red in town, because I couldn't get it slower than about 10
mph....I coulda talked my way out of a ticket.  The emergency brake is a bit loose,
or it would have stopped me.  I hadn't adjusted that since the new back end went on
the car.  The other two stop signs were a bit easier to make look legal...hills
helped me stop rolling.  

The problem was that I still had the original stainless steel brake lines that came
with the original Wilwoods.  They had been on Scott Chan's car since the mid '90s. 
One of them had a nick in the steel webbing, which I had seen a long time ago and
disregarded during maintenance, and I didn't realize that there was nothing other
than that webbing holding the line together under pressure.  That nick had failed
under my bedding pedal pressure.  It didn't fail at Thunderhill, when I was fading
those tan pads at every corner, and it didn't fail in rush hour traffic.  I could
have tried bedding the pads in slightly heavier traffic, and possibly rear ended
someone....I wouldn't have imagined not being able to stop in that car.  I just
picked that day, yesterday, to do it.

Thank you, Lowrider, yet again.

I don't think it is a POS.  Do you have any questions why?

George