Re: Back to the brake bomb story...

[Gerard <gerard@poboxes.com>]

Hi everyone,

When I was down in Cape Town I took my car to the brake experts to
finally sort out the problem with the brake bomb and my wobbly
braking system. The guy there said to get the rest of the system
up to scratch before fiddling with the brake pressure accumulator as
they're quite expensive (I'm still going to have to order it from
a fellow q-lister just to save some cash). They checked the car and
it found that my rotors in front could do with some skimming as they
are warped. The rear is warped as well. They took the measurements and
the fronts were 2mm under minimum but they skimmed them one last time.
The rear rotors are gone beyond repair. The part of the rotor where
the pad grips seems to be dug in by 0.5mm and the thickness of the
rotor on the edge is a whopping 4mm below minimum.

They skimmed the front rotors and couldn't do anything with the rear.
The replacement job for the rear runs into the $300 region which I
can't afford. After that a lot of the shaking in the front has gone and
some of the brake pressure has come back. The brakes make more of the
loud scratching when I brake now, but I believe it is because the pads
need to reset now.

I was therefore just wandering if this loss of brake pressure and poor
braking is perhaps not the accumulator, but the shot rear discs. Can
this be the case? The rear rotors are really paperthin. The guys did
not want to replace the accumulator right away as it was hard to tell
if it was the thing causing the problem and at $400 for the part it
was going to be a job way out  of my financial league.

Anyway, could the poor discs at the back give the impression of a failed
accumulator  or not? The pedal does do some shudder at the bottom of
its travel.

I am glad I had  the fronts skimmed 'cos a few days before I left the
shaking when braking had the steering wheel moving approximately 10cm
in each direction and holding onto the steering wheel when it did this
left spasm in my hands and upper arms at times.

G.
-- 
"a thousand miles from here, there is another person smiling"
1990 Turbo (200T)
name   : gerard van vught
tel    : +27-57-912 2658 (w) / 082 923 9609 (cell)
url    : http://www.acenet.co.za/homepages/gerard/
e-mail : gerard@poboxes.com  / han.solo@galaxycorp.com
         gerard@acenet.co.za / van_vught@frg.issi.co.za