Re: Followup to rear disc conversion

[shikaroka@juno.com (T Jarrett)]

On Sun, 28 Sep 1997 17:17:26 -0700 Greg Baxter <gbaxter@istar.ca> writes:
>Last week, I bored you all with my story of woe regarding the swap to 
>rear 
>discs on my pet 82 8v. I will not bore you much further, except to say 
>that 
>I completed the swap yesterday, and most everything seems to be 
>working 
>well. Of course, I have a few questions:
>
>The parking brake doesn't work now. The cables seem stuck, and pulling 
>hard 
>on the lever resulted in a broken lever. 

. My worry is that the brakes aren't actually doing 
>any 
>work, and the improvement that I'm feeling is due to the stainless 
>steel 
>lines and fresh fluid. Is my concern valid, or is it normal for the 
>discs 
>to stay 'dirty' for a while? Also, after parking the car after a good 
>drive, I let it sit for a few minutes, and then decided to check the 
>temperatures of the discs themselves. The front vented discs were a 
>great 
>deal hotter than the rear solid discs. This seems to confirm my 
>original 
>concern that the rear discs aren't really doing much.

>Greg
>82 8v
>91 Jetta


Did you adjust the piston out far enough?  On VW rear caliper you have
the turn the piston out to take up all the slack, or it just won't work.
They make a special tool for it (of course), but you can get by with a
large set of pliers to turn the piston while you pull it out, but since
you have to pull the caliper off to do it you just have to guess or
keeping trying it untill it is tight to put back on. They are not totally
self-adjusting like most people think, you have to get them pretty close
first. I have done this conversion quite a few times and yes it should
clean the rust off with one or two good strong stops, and they do tend to
lock up too easy with out the pressure adjusters that come with the rear
disked cars.
Hope this helps.


shikaroka@juno.com
82 Scirocco 16V (highly modified)
87 GTI G60
72 Baja Bug & Karmann Ghia
76 Lancia Beta Scorpion
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