Re: Brakes and Q's (long)

["Victor Farren" <vfarren@dis.cdie.org>]

>>> L Crawford <vw_lcrawfo@yahoo.ca> 07/31 3:00 PM >>>
Howdy Folks,

Hey there..


>So bleeding the breaks might fix it?  Its all that I
>can think of right now.

I am thinking warped rotors, but you seem to have already thought of that.  If your brakes feel spongy then you either have a bad MC, a leak in your lines or air or water trapped in your brake lines.  If you aren't loosing brake fluid then you don't have a leak.  Do the easiest thing first and bleed te brakes.  This would be a good idea anyway if you ahven't bled your brakes in the past year.


>If the rotars are warped... I was thinking of putting
>on vented disc brakes.  Anyone on here done this?  Is
>it expensive/hard to do?

Piece of cake.  Take the wheel off and remove the top bolt on the disc brake carrier.  This will require ttwo wrenches.  One goes over the carrier bolt and the other goes over a nut that the bolt threads through.  If you look at it you will know what I mean.  Immobilize the nut with one wrench and unscrew the carrier bolt with the other.  I think you will need a 15mm and a 14mm.  You may need to loosen the lower carrier bolt in order to swing the  disk brake down and out of the way.

The rotor is held on by a single screw (usually phillips head).  These are famous for rusting/fusing in place which  ends up with you stripping the phillpis head in the screw, using an easy out and breaking the easy out in the screw and requiring you to drill out the easy out (which is made of the hardest substance known to man which will immediately dull your drill tips, rendering them completely useless).  In order to avoid this scenario you can put the screw driver in the screw and give the driver a few solid hits with a hammer.  A lot of times the shocks the crud off the screw allowing you to unscrew it.

Remove the old rotor, put on the new one and use a new screw.  Maybe use some loctite (I think the red stuff, not the blue stuff - or is it the other way around?).  This is a good time to replace your front pads seeing that they are right there.

If you are replacing your pads you may need to recess the brake piston to allow the pads to clear the new rotor.  For that you need a large allen key (don't remember size).

I would recommend getting a Bentley manual.



>The valve cover leaks oil.  Not much but enough to be
>slightly annoying.  How long of a job is it to replace
>the gaskets?  Does anyone make a 'spiffy' value cover
>to replace my rusty black one with?

Valve cover gasket is a piece of cake.  Get a rubber one from Potterman.  Dunno about the valve cover gasket, but you could always sand the rust off and re-paint it.


HTH

Victor


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