[A4] Rear brakes

[Yee, Phil]

The rotating piston is designed to take up slack in your hand brake line as
you wear your pads down.  It is quite common for handbrakes and wear type
devices.  With this design, your hand brake handle should almost always lock
at about the same position, with the same amount of handle sweep and handle
tension.  On your wife's E36, I bet the handle will lock ever so slightly
higher as the pads (and disks) wear down.  I think it could be argued either
way as to which is better in terms of safety, cable stretching, product
quality perception, simplicity, reliability, etc. . . . whatever.

-----Original Message-----
Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 10:45:31 -0600
From: "Brandon Rogers" <brogers at terrix.com>
Subject: [A4] Rear brakes
To: "A4 List" <a4 at audifans.com>
Message-ID: <003001c43c2e$5e85b680$0b01a8c0 at terrixden>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"

Hey all-
I replaced my rear pads yesterday and have to say I want to shoot the
engineer who designed that #$%&^%$## set up!!!  I had the special tool for
turning the piston to get it to recede.  After about 15 minutes turning on
the first piston with no progress, I decided to use my 18V Craftsman
cordless driver.  Bingo, within a couple minutes it went right in.  The next
side--wanted to break in the piston so rotated by hand a few times.  Then
started using the cordless driver, within a minute or so I could smell
burning and it turns out I burned out the motor.  great. It took about 2
hours of rotating that $%#$%%&%% piston before it finally receded.  

Anybody know the supposed purpose behind this ridiculous design???  I
recently did my wife's E36 BMW in about 45 minutes combined - no rotating
piston-just used channel locks and compressed no sweat.

So lame.

Brandon
'98 A4
'84 urq