Bad bomb thread

[steveb@falcon.kla.com (Steven Buchholz)]

We need to be careful about the information that we are putting out here.  I 
don't think its a good idea to condone not replacing the hydraulic pressure 
accumulator.  

It's been an involved thread so I don't remember who originally said this the 
first time, but my experience is that if you have bad pressure accumulator on 
an otherwise normally operating system (i.e. pump working and connected to 
the brake servo), the brake system will appear to be operating correctly un-
til you get into a panic situation.  What would happen to me is that when I 
really got on the brakes, the brake warning light came on and I found I had 
to press much harder than I had anticipated to get the level of braking I 
wanted.  In and of itself this wasn't *that* much of a problem.  The real 
problem happens shortly thereafter ... once the pump started restoring the 
boost pressure the amount of pedal force I was supplying was too much, and 
I would have to remove most all of the pedal pressure to prevent a major lock 
up.  If you are anticipating this, even it may not be that big a deal, but it 
is one more thing to do at a time when you've already got a lot going on ...

I don't have a problem with people who prefer less or no boost, in this case 
I would recommend that you DISABLE the boost altogether.  IMHO simply not 
replacing a bad pressure accumulator because "you can handle it" is a poor 
judgement.  A good part of the reason I drive quattros is the active safety 
aspect ... why compromise that by not replacing a faulty braking component?

I may be overreacting because the car with which I had the bad bomb experience
was not equipped with ABS ('83 QTC).  It may be true that ABS kicks in to save
the day.  I'm sure I'll find out about that some day on the '88 ... :-)

Steve Buchholz
s_buchho@kla.com
San Jose, CA (USA)