Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[Gibbo2286]

I've seen a grease nipple fitted to the brake pipe hole and a grease gun used to wind up enough pressure to force out a stuck piston - but frightening amounts of force were needed

That has been my method forever, it never fails if you have a side lever grease gun but I always used a clean one filled with brake fluid rather than grease if I didn't want the piston right out so as to avoid contamination.

[Zelandeth]

One of the last things I am about to chuck out of the workshop is an old workmate and clamp on vice. Any use to you Zel? I' ready to bring up your crate and Jim's book once we can sort a day you are both around.

I'm pretty sure I actually do have a pretty decent old vice stowed away somewhere, but it's of limited use without a sturdy workbench to attach it to. That's very much on the "when I get the garage sorted" list. Though at this point that's very likely to be under the heading of "after we've moved house again" which may well still be years off yet.

I've seen a grease nipple fitted to the brake pipe hole and a grease gun used to wind up enough pressure to force out a stuck piston - but frightening amounts of force were needed

That has been my method forever, it never fails if you have a side lever grease gun but I always used a clean one filled with brake fluid rather than grease if I didn't want the piston right out so as to avoid contamination.

I have used that method in the past, though am somewhat wary of it following one incident involving a Lada caliper which was well enough stuck that it wound up shearing the top off the grease nipple before the piston budged. Thankfully I was smart enough to be well out the line of fire, but the cleanup took hours.

Think given these calipers seem to be relatively hard to come by just handing them over to a specialist who are far less likely to break something than me makes the most sense.

[myglaren]

With regard to people parking on your driveway:-

Buy a walking stick and leave TPA very visible.

[Gibbo2286]

Tis just popped up on the Birmingham site, might interest some.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/ ... l-screen/

[Zelandeth]

This afternoon I played chicken with the weather. This was rapidly bearing down on my position.



Mission was simple: Get the offside brake caliper off the Cavalier so I could get the pair sent off to be rebuilt.

In a rare show of organisation, I actually made a point of getting everything I expected to need out in advance and putting it where I could get to it, rather than the usual 15 trips back and forward to the garage.



Five minutes later, first contact with the enemy.



I was briefly sidetracked by a sinister looking bit of peeling seam sealer on the inner wheel arch, but thankfully I seem to have caught it in time.



Really isn't hard to see why these cars have a reputation for rusting.

Thanks to the wonders of power tools, less than ten minutes after picking tools up I had the caliper off, wheel back on and the jack back in the boot.

The little bag the jack and wheel brace live in are even colour coded to the car, how considerate of Vauxhall...



Yes I know they're just all that colour, but it amused me.

This is where we took a moment of "one step forward, two steps sideways."



These two calipers are not the same.



The one on the offside is made by Girling.



Whereas the nearside one is an ATE.



Not really surprising that the car has had one changed, but it's rather annoying as it means I don't have a matched pair to send off for rebuild.

I'm also rather alarmed that the pads in each side are a totally different brand with a significant difference in the amount of wear on them...so it seems that whoever changed the nearside caliper didn't bother swapping the offside pads when it went on... additionally the lower caliper to hub bolt was missing it's washer...You remember me saying I was going to test the rear brakes before pulling things apart? Nope...on the strength of this, they're definitely getting properly inspected beforehand now.

Don't suppose anyone has an old nearside Girling caliper floating around do they?

Did spot something I'd previously missed that was a quick fix (well, it still needs a little attention but is a lot better). Spot the difference.





The valance had been shoved upwards on the offside. It still needs a little finessing and whatever did the damage has broken off one of the tabs where it attaches to the lower part of the wing, but it's a lot better.



So a little stuck while I decide what to do about the brakes. If I can't track down either another ATE or Girling caliper I will probably just end up buying a new pair, as don't want to hold this up too long.

[Zelandeth]

Currently away from home in the US, so will have nothing to report car wise for a bit. Though assuming the part numbers are correct I *should* have a factory rebuilt ATE brake caliper for the Cavalier on the way. So when I'm back I should be able to get the ball rolling there. If it looks like the caliper was rebuilt back in the 90s as I'm kind of expecting, they'll both be sent off to Bigg Red to be given a good once over. Which I'm kind of inclined to do anyway in the interests of long term reliability.

In other news, a little while back I picked this up for not very much.



However I ran into an issue in that I totally failed to properly take note of the fact that the focus ring is a multiple thread screw when I dismantled it for cleaning (there was a bunch of mould on the inside of the lens). So the focus ended up way out of whack, resulting in the focal point when set to infinity being about 3' in front of the camera.

I've just had the first film from after I had hopefully fixed this problem back (well, the scans of it anyway - the actual negatives are currently around 3500 miles away).









Think I can call that fixed!

Sadly I can't remember what film that was!

This was Ektar 100 in the Konica AutoReflex T3, at a local car show a couple of weeks ago.















I did snap a few photos with the Ensign there too, haven't had that film back yet though.

[CitroJim]

Just caught up on your adventures Zel... Great to see sone excellent progress on the old Chav

[Zelandeth]

Just caught up on your adventures Zel... Great to see sone excellent progress on the old Chav

Cheers Jim. Hopefully it shouldn't be massively far from a careful test drive.

-- -- --

Apparently the new caliper has now arrived back home.  Sadly I'm currently 3,500 miles away from the car so it'll need to wait for attention!

Whether that caliper gets sent off along with the original one for inspection and any necessary rebuild work will depend on what it looks like.  I may well send them both away anyway for the sake of long term reliability anyway.  It's not as though I can start putting stuff back together properly until they're both present anyway.  It *looks* good in the photos on the eBay listing, but we all know how much that means.

Also on the subject of brakes, discs.  Am I correct in thinking that the wheel bearing races are pressed into the discs on these?  I've got a new pair of discs in the boot waiting to go on, but will get a bearing set ordered too if that's the case.  If I need to take everything apart anyway I'm inclined to just change the consumables involved to save me time and head off future failures before they have a chance to pop up.

[CitroJim]

If you need a hydraulic press for the bearings you are welcome to use mine Zel

[Zelandeth]

If you need a hydraulic press for the bearings you are welcome to use mine Zel

Thanks. It sounds from what a couple of folks have said that it shouldn't be needed here. Just always fun figuring these things out on a car you don't know!

Have fun memories of trying to get the outer race out of a brake disc on a Skoda Estelle without a press many years ago...that was a gigantic faff and took me a whole afternoon.

[CitroJim]

Without a press Zel, it's not so much the problem of removing the old ones as it is to install the new ones without harming them...

[Zelandeth]

The new one slipped in pretty easy using the trick of heating the disc and freezing the race, using a big socket as a drift. I suspect there was a bit of a rust lip I was fighting with getting the old one out too.

It very much fell under the heading then of my being far enough into the job that I'd immobilised the only car I had, with the nearest motor factor being ~15 miles away, and I needed the car for college the next day, so I just had to make it work.

A lot of jobs seemed to follow that routine...

[CitroJim]

Ahh! That's proper old-school bearing installation Zel

Used to use that method a lot on 2-stroke engines when swapping main bearings...

[Zelandeth]

Ah, life in a US state with no vehicle inspections. Michigan in this case.



The other side didn't superficially look so bad until you realised that the inner and outer sills were *completely* missing.

This is not even *close* to the shonkiest thing I've seen on the road so far yet either, just a pretty typical example I came across in a parking lot. Being overtaken on the freeway by a pickup truck that's doing 90+ while visibly bending in the middle is somewhat unnerving.

Cars here literally get used until they can't function any more. Last time I was here there was a Ford Focus that was running around locally here with the entire front end held together by structural duct tape, zip ties and a windscreen made of perspex, having been in a significant enough shunt that all the airbags had deployed. It was clear that the left hand side of the car was a good few inches shorter than the right and the thing went down the road visibly crabbing to the left. That was just over five years ago. Saw it again today, still going.

Quite a different world here in some ways!

[CitroJim]

^^ Gosh, that's truly shocking Zel!