No brakes please help
07-02-2007, 09:45 PM
#1
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No brakes please help IT all started last thursday when i bought new brakes for my 1998 T/A. after finally figuring out how to compress the pistons i got my brakes on. I went out driving and after awhile i started to hear a noise coming from the front drivers side wheel. Soon it felt as thought the brakes were on the whole time. I left town for the weekend and came back to hit it today. I went drivng and they started to smoke. I took them off and put them back on and went drivng and now i have no brakes .....PLease help
07-03-2007, 12:41 PM
#2
it's kinda hard to explain over the web a fix to your problem, given your description and not having seen anything first hand.
Figuring the car is almost 10 years old, unknown amount of miles, and not knowing your mechanical knowledge:
do you know your calipers are good? Are they the originals?
Compressing the pistons are very simple- use a c-clamp with either the caliper off the car or the master cylinder cover open so when you push the piston into the caliper brake fluid has somewhere to go. If they don't go in, the inside of the caliper, piston, and seal is probably shot from rust/dirt. Just go by a reman caliper for $40, or use compressed air and blow the pistons out of the caliper and inspect/repair/reseal them.
The other thing are the slide pins the caliper rides on which hooks it up to the outside bracket holding the pads on the outside of the rotor. hopefully you know what those are. They need to be clean and lubed well with good grease so they move easily, otherwise the calipers will hang up and not apply even nor equal force to the inner and outer pads. These are really the only 2 things that'll cause your brakes to not release or not work like you described.
Third is making sure you don't have any line or brake fitting leaks and make sure no air is in the system. I used earl's solo-bleed bleeder screws on the calipers. I highly recommend using them unless you have access to a pressurized brake bleeder. If you did the two man bleeding method using the oem bleeder screws, you probably have air in there. Spend $20 on a set of solo-bleeds.
after you do all this and you know you've bled the system correctly and there's no air in there, if then you still have problems begin looking at your master cylinder.
hopefully you didn't run your master cylinder empty when you did your brakes, and didn't do anything goofy like use dot5 fluid.
if you have traction control, my 2002 oem service manual says bleeding order is : right rear, left front, left rear, right front. That's how I did mine and no problems. I don't know the reason it differs from the traditional method. If you don't have traction control, the order is the traditional: right rear, left rear, right front, left front.
Figuring the car is almost 10 years old, unknown amount of miles, and not knowing your mechanical knowledge:
do you know your calipers are good? Are they the originals?
Compressing the pistons are very simple- use a c-clamp with either the caliper off the car or the master cylinder cover open so when you push the piston into the caliper brake fluid has somewhere to go. If they don't go in, the inside of the caliper, piston, and seal is probably shot from rust/dirt. Just go by a reman caliper for $40, or use compressed air and blow the pistons out of the caliper and inspect/repair/reseal them.
The other thing are the slide pins the caliper rides on which hooks it up to the outside bracket holding the pads on the outside of the rotor. hopefully you know what those are. They need to be clean and lubed well with good grease so they move easily, otherwise the calipers will hang up and not apply even nor equal force to the inner and outer pads. These are really the only 2 things that'll cause your brakes to not release or not work like you described.
Third is making sure you don't have any line or brake fitting leaks and make sure no air is in the system. I used earl's solo-bleed bleeder screws on the calipers. I highly recommend using them unless you have access to a pressurized brake bleeder. If you did the two man bleeding method using the oem bleeder screws, you probably have air in there. Spend $20 on a set of solo-bleeds.
after you do all this and you know you've bled the system correctly and there's no air in there, if then you still have problems begin looking at your master cylinder.
hopefully you didn't run your master cylinder empty when you did your brakes, and didn't do anything goofy like use dot5 fluid.
if you have traction control, my 2002 oem service manual says bleeding order is : right rear, left front, left rear, right front. That's how I did mine and no problems. I don't know the reason it differs from the traditional method. If you don't have traction control, the order is the traditional: right rear, left rear, right front, left front.