All of us make errors, proper? Yesterday within the waning hours of daylight after combating a automotive undertaking for about 5 hours, I broke my automotive in a manner that I’ve by no means seen earlier than. Certainly a consequence of fatigue, chilly, laziness, and rush, I by accident snapped the mounting ear off of my Audi’s driver aspect entrance brake caliper. And the humorous factor is, I wasn’t even engaged on the automotive’s braking system in any respect, I used to be putting in entrance reducing springs. It was all going so properly, proper up till it wasn’t.
Possibly a few of you who’ve finished suspension work on a MQB chassis Audi A3, Volkswagen Golf, or Jetta already know the place I’m going with this. Or perhaps it’s all going to be a shock, I’m undecided. I’ll make one other put up in regards to the suspension work as soon as I get a possibility to check out my new springs, however for now we’re going to sit down within the second and chuckle about my fuck up.
I’ll be trustworthy, I used to be feeling fairly good about this undertaking and the way easily it was going. I’d struggled a little bit with the driving force’s aspect, however the passenger aspect went collectively fairly simply as soon as I’d realized the methods from the primary aspect. The educational curve had a pointy fall off. The one minor hiccup I had in the course of the set up course of was once I was undoing the strut high nuts on the driving force’s aspect and my 13mm ratcheting wrench fell into the black gap of abyss on the high proper nook of the above photograph. Wherever that gap results in I can’t appear to search out and my magnet wasn’t robust sufficient to search out the wrench once more. I suppose it’s a sacrifice to the wrenching gods.
So, how did the caliper break? Nicely, you might know that with the intention to get the knuckle low sufficient to extract the strut meeting, you have to undo the 24mm CV axle bolt. With the intention to do this you have to cease the meeting from turning, and there are a couple of methods to do this. Usually you’d do that with the automotive on the bottom and the burden of the automotive on the tire stopping the spin, then pop off the wheel middle cap and crank away. The middle bore of my OZ Rally wheels is just too small to permit the 24mm socket by way of, in order that received’t work for me. One other methodology is to have a buddy stand on the brakes so you possibly can apply the required torque to the bolt. My spouse was round and amenable to serving to, however as a substitute of bothering her I made a decision to go a 3rd course. I jammed a quarter-inch extension into the vanes of the aspect of the rotor and torqued towards that.
That’s not the dumb half. The dumb half was once I forgot the quarter-inch extension within the rotor. After checking and double-checking that all the things was correctly torqued and again the place it wanted to be, I cleaned up my instruments, put away my rolling stool, bolted the wheels again on, eliminated the jack stands and wheel chocks, and bought within the automotive to reposition it for “completed” pictures.
After I sat within the automotive and fired it up on the automotive’s 100-horsepower electrical motor it initially wouldn’t budge. “Oh, proper,” I believed to myself, “I placed on the electrical parking brake.” So I turned off the brake and popped the automotive again in reverse. After initially binding, the automotive rapidly broke unfastened and I used to be rolling, however my brake pedal stress felt bizarre, so I finished, put the automotive in park, and bought out once more.
I’ll admit I didn’t instantly know what had gone unsuitable, however I knew one thing was unsuitable. I bought down on the bottom to go searching beneath the automotive for a forgotten jackstand or one thing that will have certain up towards the automotive. Then it hit me like a sack of bricks. As soon as I remembered what I’d forgotten I simply began laughing like a maniac in my driveway. The solar was taking place and my excellent plan of getting out for an attractive photograph shoot within the gloaming of the afternoon was shot by way of.
Nicely, nothing to do however assess the injury. Jacked again up, wheel again off, I noticed the gronked brake caliper and my coronary heart sank. that feeling when all the things goes so nice after which one thing completely devastating occurs? It one way or the other hurts worse, proper? There’s nothing to be saved right here, sadly. The forged aluminum can be tough to weld correctly, so I’m not getting away with no substitute caliper. I suppose that is going to be a expensive restore.
After a sizzling bathe to wash the suspension gunk off of myself, and the despair out of my mind, I set to work. After confirming I’d be capable of bleed the brakes myself with no Volkswagen/Audi pc, I poked round to search out which of the various auto components shops in my space had a brake caliper accessible close by. It seems NAPA has one in a warehouse on the town, and it ought to be accessible for pickup later right now. This unbelievable fuck up solely actually price me about $160 for a reconditioned caliper, a four-mile Uber trip to select it up, a quart (or much less) of brake fluid from my stash, and a shiny chrome vanadium quarter-inch extension. Oh, and that 13mm wrench that’s a part of the automotive now. And some hours of labor.
My neighbor’s cat stopped by on the finish of the day to cheer me up. I feel it labored. All of us make errors. We will repair our errors.
