Last month I installed new brakes for the second time in about 4 - 5 years. The first time I did my brakes I installed everything new except for calipers. At the time I rebuilt my calipers according the best instructions available. They worked for a while and then after a year or so one or more of them started sticking which led to a host of problems.
This time I decided to do remanufactured calipers to avoid the headaches.
So I installed new rotors, calipers and pads. The brake lines were stainless steel from the previous install and have served me well.
The rotors were ATE, the calipers reman’d Beck-Arnley and the pads were Carbotech Bobcats. It should have been a pretty sweet experience as soon as they were bedded in.
Then the nightmare began:
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I purchased speed bleeders to make the bleeding process a snap. When I started bleeding I couldn’t get all of the bubbles out. This is after days of rebleeding. I was beginning to suspect air in the master cylinder (only a year or so old and pretty sure I never let it go dry). So I left the whole thing overnight and in the morning found brake fluid all over the rear passenger tires inner surface. It was dripping down from a leaking bleed screw. So I tightened it and tried to rebleed any air that was introduced. That only allowed more air to get into the system as the speed bleeder threads weren’t able to stop the air coming back in. Maybe bad speed bleeders? I put the original bleed screws back in. Same problem. So a damaged or bad casting around the bleed screw.
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Called the vendor and they said, “purchase another and return the other and we’ll credit you”. No problem. Got the new reman’d caliper and I’m running out of spare time so I have a decent shop do the install. Big suprise, the new reman’d caliper also leaks in the same way – not quite as bad, but still. They said they had to really torque it down to get it to stop. Bad juju since that can’t be good for an already shakey casting. Anyway…
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Time to bed the pads. I follow Carbotech’s bedding directions to the letter. Mostly it just involves a series quick stops from about 60 to 30, cooling and repeating. While doing this I noticed a continuous clicking from my front right caliper during the hard braking. Crap! This has me confused. What the hell could be making it do that? Take it to the same shop and they can’t reproduce it. Shocked that they didn’t have the talent to notice such a serious fault in the caliper I take it to the only repair shop that I still trust.
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Super trusted shop immediately finds air bubbles in system and power bleeds (good, thanks). Call me back saying they can’t quite reproduce clicking because the Carbotech’s are making too much noise since they are brand new and haven’t completed their break-in. I tell them to take it out on the highway and brake hard. They call back and have it nailed down. The caliper pins or pin shaft they slot into are out of spec because the mechanic can push sideways (radially) on the caliper and it moves out of place where it should not move at all (maybe 5 mm at very most). The caliper and caliper mount are solidly bolted down. So a bad casting (again) leads to dislocation of the caliper under heavy braking which causes some part of the caliper/rotor system to rub (slots in rotors probably rubbing somewhere).
So now I get to go back through the “purchase another” cycle until I get a new one?
This is getting painful. Three of the Beck-Arnley remans were bad. I would have purchased OEMs at discount, but they stopped being available a long time ago.
So my trusted repair shop is almost an hour away and I’ll go pick it up and deal with it when I have time – though I can’t imagine the out-of-spec caliper doing any good for the expensive Carbotech pads.
Thinking about options:
First I’ll return all of the bad stuff. Keep my cores because the reman caliper builders don’t seem to make any guarantees about the quality of the castings themselves.
Options:
(1) Buy a full rebuild kit for the caliper in question and just do it myself when I have the time (in short supply I can tell you).
(2) Buy another one until I get one that works. Unfortunately all of this debugging is costing me a boatload of time (not to mention money)
(3) Let the shop do it and get gouged for a shop provided (reman’d) caliper and labor so that they have to make it work.
(4) Buy a StopTech or Brembo full big brake kit with new calipers. (Hose it down with lots of money $1695 for StopTech)
(5) Say screw it and ask G2IC people what to do? Any ideas for good quality alternative calipers, brake kit sets, real new calipers etc.
Any help most welcome. I am so tired of this…
Eris