Sunday, January 26, 2014

Another Day Another Brake Project


stubborn rusted bolts
all the brake line is rusted and Oggy is on his back again in the Texas dust trying to get rusted fittings off of 45 year old brake hubs. I did learn that the bleeder screw can be left in the wheel cylinder if it is too rusted to get out. Get a new wheel cylinder and leave the bleeder screw alone...and there is a pressure differential valve that has a warning light that might've told me I'd lost all the pressure in the rear brakes so when the front brakes failed I would have no brakes at all. But that warning system is long gone...so it was quite a surprise when I lost my brakes. In the past few years if I'd lost my brakes at one of several hundred dangerous locations Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevadas, Mexican desert, Labrador forest...New York Parkway...I'd've died. But it happened on a flat road in Texas. I mean, the brakes were gone. I learned that the rear brake cylinders were barely working and the front lost all fluid, so I had nothing. The parking brake would've done nothing. I downshift and then bite the bullet and put it in park, maybe destroy the transmission trying to save my life.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.