[Shotimes] Dodged yet ANOTHER bullet yesterday....was:
Brakes...was: ......
Ian Fisher
dataflash@yahoo.com
Mon, 26 Jul 2004 20:35:00 -0700 (PDT)
I had much the same thing happen to me and had to limp
home a short distance. The only difference was that
the stock bleeder valve on the BSL just started
leaking for no reason. I was blowing brake fluid all
over the place and didn't even know what the problem
was until after I had replaced the front lines (they
were long overdue anyway). I have speedbleeders laying
around to install in all of my calipers when I get a
chance. Some have suggested that these can leak over
time but I can't imagine them lasting a shorter period
of time vs. the wilwood bleeders. Next time around, I
want to get the FSL's though.
You must have quite a stockpile of HPS pads if Kirk
and I both sent you a few sets. I like the ones that I
have on the car now...
Ian
--- George Fourchy <krazgeo@comcast.net> wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Shotimes mailing list
> Shotimes@autox.team.net
> http://www.team.net/mailman/listinfo/shotimes
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail