Anyways, a few weeks ago, I was up in Minster working on the house with the boys when one of the rear brake lines gave out. It had rusted away to nothing. After making a temporary repair, I was able to drive back home to Cincinnati and then have it fixed that week at a local
garage.
I have had three instances where all of a sudden, the brakes act just like when the line was broke, I.E. The peddle goes to the floor and basically I only have emergency mechanical brakes on the driver's side front wheel. Well, the pads were pretty low to begin with, so I think
these few incidents destroyed my rotor.
While on vacation, I ordered new rotors for the front of the truck, and new pads all around. The parts came the next day after we returned. And after looking closer, I don't believe that I need to change the second rotor. I had a friend who was going to help me, but he was unable to do it for a while. Since I need to drive to my parents this weekend, I basically had to have it fixed, or Rachel would not have a car. So I decided to try to do it myself. One of my co-workers volenteered to help me out, and I am eternally grateful that he did.
We had three moments where we really thought we were done working and would have to wait for the next day. The first was because we had the wrong sized socket for the axle nuts. I rented a 34 and a 36mm from Autozone. Would you believe that the axle nuts on my truck are 72mm big? Do you know who sells a socket that big? Me either, we couldn't find one. We were able to get the nuts off with a set of channel locks.
The second thing that almost killed the evening is that we could not for the life of us get the old rotor unbolted from the wheel hub. After trying many different wrench combinations, and even my air rachet, we were about to give up, when Ron mentioned that he had an impact wrench. After thinking about it for a while, he ran home and got it ( truthfully, I basically begged him ;)). Once we had that the bolts came off with just one giving us any trouble.
The third item that almost made us quit for the night was after the hub was back on the car, the axle nuts tightened and the drive shaft coupler back one. The drive shaft floats a little, and uses spacers and a ring clip to keep the movement to a minimum. We couldn't get the ring clip back on. After a while we were about to give up, as it was after 10 pm and we were pretty tired. I looked at Ron and said "Lets give it one more try.". I didn't think we were going to do it again
when Ron's hand slipped, but somehow, it clipped right in :). After putting the new pads on that wheel, we buttened up everything and called it a night. Tomorrow night I will replace the brake pads on the other three wheels. As I said, I don't think I will need to replace the other rotor. I might, but I don't think so.
Oh, an thanks again to Ron for all his help, he also fixed my rear light that has been acting finicky while I was working on something else :).
I have a bunch of stuff to return to AutoZone tomorrow, including some rental tools. Overall a very interesting learning experiance.
