I'm not a gearhead. Never been a fan of NASCAR. I appreciate nice styling and clean design on vehicles, but most modern cars leave me cold--they're a monoculture of blandness, the only goal to be as inoffensive to the greatest number of potential buyers possible. So I don't tinker. Getting grease up to my elbows isn't my idea of fun.
Sometimes it can't be helped. The brakes on The Wife's minivan were in sore need of changing, and as I am pathologically averse to paying the extortion rates of a garage to have such a basic service performed, the only option was to do it myself. I've changed the front disc pads on countless cars, so this couldn't be much more difficult. Oh, have I mentioned that the brakes needing attention were the rear ones? This, I have since learned, makes a great deal of difference. Firstly, the 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan The Wife drives is not equipped with brake drums and shoes like normal vehicles are. No, the 2008 model sports rear disc pads. Which, I'm thinking, simplifies matters. Silly me. Changing the front disc pads is relatively straightforward, in that once you have the wheel off and the brake assembly detached, you simply replace the old pads with new ones and then use something like a C clamp to compress the caliper piston so you can reassembly the whole shebang. I found out right away that I couldn't do this with the rear brakes, because the rear caliper piston--for some unfathomable reason--is a screw-type assembly. Which means that not only do you have to press it in, you have to rotate it simultaneously to get it compressed enough for reassembly. I read online that some people have had success using needle nose pliers to affect this pressure/rotation trick. I am not one of those people.
Fortunately, there is a happy ending to this tale. Autozone will rent--for free!--a simple threaded caliper tool that makes the task a straightforward effort. They took a $50 deposit on my credit card, I took the tool home and finished the frustrating job, then took the tool back and my deposit was refunded, simple as that. And the minivan has brand-new brakes now. Yay!
Join us next month when I purchase a brake spoon with which to replace the brake shoes on my PT Cruiser...
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Chicken Ranch Central
AutoZone is just awesome. Love that place. I've never set foot in one where the employees came off as not caring...one time I'm looking at tools when I overhear a woman come in and say, "I think something's wrong with my car battery", and the guy grabs a tester of some sort, throws on his coat, and says, "Let's go have a look!" He could have looked up her car and sold her a battery, but he tried to help figure out the problem instead of just taking an easy sale. I wasn't around to see how that played out, but AutoZone does that kind of stuff all the time, that I've seen.
ReplyDelete(No, this is not a commercial endorsement for AutoZone!)