I have never been a car guy. Sure I enjoyed Night-Rider and Dukes of Hazard as a kid but that's about as far as it got. If a car doesn't talk to me and tell me how to fix it, I don't have any idea what to do. So when my car brakes started squeaking, I ignored them.
"That's gotta be somebody else's car right?" I said to myself with hope and a silent desperate prayer to the god of transportation (I think his name is Goodwrench, or goodyear, or maybe that's just a blimp up there.)
I must not have gotten the name right because the squeak turned into a grinding noise.
"Man, that guy's really gotta get his brakes fixed!" I thought. I was still in the denial stage.
Then the grinding noise started happening all the time.
"HE'S FOLLOWING ME EVERYWHERE!" Again denial, with a touch of paranoia.
Eventually I had to accept that I needed new brakes, and at this point, the mechanic will know that I don't know anything and take advantage of that fact. I have watched a friend of mine do brakes a few times and he said very convincingly how easy they were, and I watched a You-tube video on how to change my car's brakes and it appeared REALLY easy, so being on a tight budget, I decided to fix them myself.
I should bring up at this time that it is winter here, and not just any winter, a record setting bad winter. It is bad enough to start political debates about the cause and correct terminology for the amount of cold and snow we are getting. Our condo does not have a garage, so I waited for a decent day to work on the car. And I waited…. And I waited.
Finally, on the way home from work one night, a bunch of dashboard lights I had never heard of turned on and instead of stopping, the brakes started to just gradually slow me down. The car had spoken just as clearly as if it had broadcast to my watch and said "Michael (Night) I need my brakes changed NOW!" Da na nah nah nah na na na na na nah nah (Horn playing Dixieland) So I stopped by an auto zone and picked up some brakes and a C Clamp to reset the Calipers and drove gingerly home.
The next day I called and told my boss that I had no brakes on my car so I would either get there REALLY fast or not at all. It was a slow day at work so they were fine with me staying home to fix the brakes rather than risking the drive. I waited until about 10:00 in the morning so that all the commuters would be gone, then I gathered my tools and put on some old warm clothes and went out to my car.
Step one: Loosen the Lug nuts. No trouble here.
Step two: Jack up the car. Here the trouble starts. This car is relatively new to me and I never had a flat tire, but most cars are about the same, so I popped the trunk, lifted out the trunk lining to get to the spare tire compartment and stood there staring in disbelief for about 3.5 minutes. Where the jack would be, should be and always has been on every other car I have ever owned, there was a big empty space the size of a spare tire, and where the jack would, should and always has been on every other car I have ever owned was an air compressor. I was disappointed, but the universe loves to play tricks on me like this, so I took it in stride and walked back into the condo, and watched a whole season of "Being Human" The British version on Netflix, The actors are all less attractive than the American version but the writing and the acting is better. My wife Nicole got home around 4:30 that afternoon and we dug the jack out of her truck to use. She drives a large Ford Pickup so that she can trailer her horse around to ride on weekends, so I figured that the jack for it should more than handle the weight of my puny Hybrid Malibu. Thank god we never had to use this jack on her truck. I struggled with it for about 20 minutes to get the car elevated enough to pull off one of the tires. To turn it you had to jam the crowbar end of the tire iron into an opening and hold that in place yourself while cranking the bent socket end repeatedly and slowly lifting the car. It got harder to turn as the car went up.
"Surely a jack that comes with a truck will be able to lift a vehicle pretty high off the ground." I thought, incorrectly as I blistered my hands cranking that jack from hell. eventually I got the car elevated enough to jimmy the tire off... barely. (Foreshadowing)
Step three: Remove the caliper. The part that holds the brake pads on is called a Caliper. It is held on by only two bolts in the back of it. In the video, the mechanic uses a socket wrench to loosen them and remove them no problem. He does one of the front tires in the video, but says the back is the same. I started in the back, because those brakes are less important, so If I screwed them up, it shouldn't be as bad. Such is the level of my mechanical acumen, I enter the project planning to mess-up at least once. The bolts that hold the back caliper on are actually butted against a giant spring (not the technical term for it, but again, I'm not a car guy) I don't own a socket wrench, but I have a bunch of channel locks and regular wrenches that I think will do the trick. Wrong again! I can't get a good angle on the bolts and I also can't generate enough torque to loosen them without the channel locks or the wrench coming open and rounding the edges of the bolt, which even I know would be bad. Not all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light kind of bad, but bad none the less. I decide I need to buy the socket wrench, so I drive my wife's car to the Ace near our house and ask the helpful hardware man to unlock the socket wrench case. He does and asks (helpfully) what size do I need.
"14 millimeter." I say with confidence. I had rewatched the video before leaving my house just to be sure.
"Huh. We are all out of those." Really universe? really?
"You could buy a kit." he says (helpfully). The kit has a bunch of sockets and is only about 12 bucks more than what I would have spent on the one, so I say ok and head up to the register to purchase the kit.
"Do you have an Ace card?" the clerk asks me (helpfully). This is when I realize, no I don't have an Ace card, in fact I don't have any cards because my wallet is at home in my other coat.
Later, after I drove home, got the wallet, checked out a different Ace and bought the Socket Wrench Kit, I was back outside, in the dark 20 degree snow covered parking lot under a streetlight armed with my new tool, trying like hell to get it to fit in between the giant spring (not a car guy) and the caliper. I got it on there finally and removed the bolts and got the caliper off. Here is where I must admit that I was trying to turn the bolts the wrong way to loosen them. Righty Tighty Lefty Loosy is easy to remember, but figuring out that I am facing the opposite way that I am turning so I need to turn it right to loosen and left to tighten was too complicated for me at that point.
Step 4: Switch out the brake. Caliper removed, I tried to remove the old brake pads. In the video, they came right off. My brake pads, had fused in place and required a great deal of prying out with a flat head screwdriver. Apparently that guy in the video didn't wait until his car was angry with him before changing his breaks. Eventually, the pads were replaced. and the rotors were deemed "Good enough".
Step 5: Reset the Caliper. Brake Calipers extend outward to clamp your brakes shut and stop the car. After you change your brakes the calipers extend all the way out and you have to push them back to their original position in order to put them back on. In the video this was done easily with a C Clamp. Here is where I discover that the C Clamp I bought for this purpose is too small and would not push the caliper in at all. Luckily Nicole has seen people doing brakes have this same problem and suggested needle nose pliers. So with a pair of needle-nose pliers I gripped a tiny ledge on the inside of the caliper and slowly turned it until I got it reset enough to put it back on.
Step 6: Put the tire back on. Now it is very dark and late and cold. Many hours have gone by and I am excited because I am almost done with this one set of breaks. I have everything back in place and I go to put the tire back on and it will not go. The wheel base is about 3 inches too low. I crank on the jack for a while but nothing seems to happen. Finally, I decide to call into work the next day too. I put a concrete block under the car and call it a night, thus completing my journey to the poor white trash side.
The next morning I discovered that if I lifted up on the independent suspension, I could get the tire back on.
Step 7: Normally this step would be repeat the above on each of the other tires. If you have actually read this up until now, you know only a complete idiot would ever repeat what I have done up until now, so I did the rest of the breaks correctly and finished them in a couple of hours.
Step 8: Refill the brake fluid. Piece o Cake.
Step 9: I skipped step nine and went to step 10
Step 10: Test Drive. Not many people are around our condo complex in the middle of a weekday, so I decided to test-drive the car to see how I did. I started it up and began to idle around the parking lot. I pump the breaks and… nothing happens. The car does not slow down at all, and I have a moment of sheer panic as I think to myself:
"Great, I just killed myself trying to save a couple hundred bucks."
I try the brakes a few more times as circle the lot slowly and they gradually get more effective until they actually stop the car. Step 9 that I skipped is to pump the brakes so that the brake fluid runs through the car. I park the car, say a silent prayer of thanks that I made it through the whole process relatively unscathed and went upstairs to a long hot shower.
Yeah, I have successfully(?) worked on my car. Nicole told me she was proud of me and asked:
"So when can you do my brakes?"
Perhaps the my greatest feat through all of this was not saying the first 3 things that came into my mind at that question and instead saying
"Just as soon as I get some better tools."
Man card earned.
No comments:
Post a Comment