Well, Hoaxy, I hope you have plenty of Red Bull at home! LOL!
Oh my God - What a mission that turned out to be!
I bought a Halfords Professional 120 piece tool set at lunch as that was on offer for like £97 down from £175 and I would need the tools to replace the old ones anyway. That contained all the sockets, spanners and the T40 bit that i needed, so i was fairly pleased with myself. I also picked up a tub of copper slip (which may well last me forever)... So far so good!
Decided to head down to the car at 7pm to crack on while my missus got dinner ready. 1st mistake was to misplace the barrier entry card! I spent 30mins looking for that (before Lou came down and found it down the side of the seat) as i could not get through the barrier to get the car under the lights and out of the rain.
After about 20mins of looking i decided I needed to crack on, so started getting the wheels off. Lou found the swipe card, but i was already underway outside, so thought i would crack on before I lost daylight.
It must have taken me 30mins to get the wheels off! F*cking Quikfit changed the tyres for me a couple of weeks ago and must have re-torqued the bolts up to like a million lb/ft. To be fair, i only had the flimsy wheel brace in the tool kit, but my arms, kegs, feet, hands and shoulders are suffering today.
So, car is jacked up... One caliper, after some effort, comes off, torx screw comes out (very easily) and disc swapped over, after A LOT of pulling on the disc as they clearly hadn't copper slipped that before it was last replaced!!!
Go to the other side and repeat the process... so far so good!
So, I take the old pads out (worn down to the metal
) and go to put the brand new pads in... Hmmm... They don't it. They look the same (other than having sensor wires) but they don't go in the carrier...
Offering the pads up to the caliper and the old pads, i see that the metal locating 'tabs' are about a single mm too wide. Oh well, it's late, shops are closed and we have to drive the car to Yorkshire tomorrow (now today) so I guess i will fiel them down. Call Lou in the flat and ask her to bring my file down... No file to be found!
Thankfully i have some wet and dry! 4 sheets of that and about an hour later i have sanded down all 4 brake pads and they all fit the carriers. After much levering and effort I get the caliper back on the car and that is one side done!
So, it is now getting dark (I have no torch) and can't really get the car inside as it is in bits. I go to the other side and one pad goes in fine... The other one, literally, never goes back in. It looks like the pad retaining spring is getting caught on a casting mould slip line in the caliper... To cut a long story short, it is pitch black and 11pm, I am sitting in a puddle and my dinenr has been ready since 7:30pm.
If i put an old (but the one with most meat on it) pad back in, then it doesn't need to be pushed back as far into the caliper as the new one (as it is thinner) an dthe old retaining spring doesn't interfere with the casting mark. So, the old one goes back in and i bolt it all up together.
At 11:30pm, i go for a test drive round the car park and (other than the car not idling, now cured since we gave it a 50mile test drive to work this morning) everything would appear to be fine. It stops ok, makes no awful grinding noises and the warning lights on the dash are now off - hurrah!
So, all is well that ends well. I will strip the side with the old pad in when we get back from Yorkshire in the dry and in the daylight and I doubt that will take much to fix - I literally had to pull it all apart and reassemble it 'by feel' in the dark, i am sure it will be fine when i can see it and work out how to sort it, after all, the other pads must have gone in new.
I feel a great sense of satisfaction from doing this myself and now it is all copper slipped up, it will be SO much easier next time. However, what a mission! I am not sure I would have bothered doing it (would have just taken it to a garage) had I known how that was going to turn out!
If I had air tools, a lift, somwhere dry, with plenty of light, it is probably an hour job... On my garage floor it is probably a 2hr job. Out in teh wet and dark, on your own... a full 4hrs+ Ouch!
Still, at least it is running and stopping and ready for its long journey tonight!!
Thanks for all the help chaps!
Dom
