All of us make errors, proper? Yesterday within the waning hours of daylight after battling a automobile mission for about 5 hours, I broke my automobile in a means 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 facet entrance brake caliper. And the humorous factor is, I wasn’t even engaged on the automobile’s braking system in any respect, I used to be putting in entrance reducing springs. It was all going so effectively, proper up till it wasn’t.
Possibly a few of you who’ve executed suspension work on a MQB chassis Audi A3, Volkswagen Golf, or Jetta already know the place I’m going with this. Or possibly it’s all going to be a shock, I’m unsure. 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 sincere, I used to be feeling fairly good about this mission and the way easily it was going. I’d struggled a little bit with the motive force’s facet, however the passenger facet went collectively fairly simply as soon as I’d realized the tips from the primary facet. The educational curve had a pointy fall off. The one minor hiccup I had throughout the set up course of was after I was undoing the strut prime nuts on the motive force’s facet and my 13mm ratcheting wrench fell into the black gap of abyss on the prime 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? Properly, it’s possible you’ll know that with a purpose to get the knuckle low sufficient to extract the strut meeting, you’ll want to undo the 24mm CV axle bolt. With a purpose to do this you’ll want to cease the meeting from turning, and there are a couple of methods to try this. Usually you’ll do that with the automobile on the bottom and the burden of the automobile on the tire stopping the spin, then pop off the wheel heart cap and crank away. The middle bore of my OZ Rally wheels is simply too small to permit the 24mm socket by means of, in order that received’t work for me. One other technique is to have a pal stand on the brakes so you may apply the mandatory 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 path. I jammed a quarter-inch extension into the vanes of the facet of the rotor and torqued in opposition to that.
That’s not the dumb half. The dumb half was after I forgot the quarter-inch extension within the rotor. After checking and double-checking that every thing 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 received within the automobile to reposition it for “completed” pictures.
Once I sat within the automobile and fired it up on the automobile’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 automobile again in reverse. After initially binding, the automobile shortly broke free and I used to be rolling, however my brake pedal strain felt bizarre, so I finished, put the automobile in park, and received out once more.
I’ll admit I didn’t instantly know what had gone flawed, however I knew one thing was flawed. I received down on the bottom to go searching beneath the automobile for a forgotten jackstand or one thing that may have sure up in opposition to the automobile. 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 happening and my good plan of getting out for a fantastic photograph shoot within the gloaming of the afternoon was shot by means of.
Properly, nothing to do however assess the injury. Jacked again up, wheel again off, I noticed the gronked brake caliper and my coronary heart sank. You realize that feeling when every thing goes so nice after which one thing completely devastating occurs? It by some means hurts worse, proper? There’s nothing to be saved right here, sadly. The solid aluminum could be difficult to weld correctly, so I’m not getting away and not using a substitute caliper. I suppose that is going to be a expensive restore.
After a scorching bathe to scrub the suspension gunk off of myself, and the despair out of my mind, I set to work. After confirming I might be capable to bleed the brakes myself and not using a Volkswagen/Audi pc, I poked round to search out which of the various auto components shops in my space had a brake caliper out there close by. It seems NAPA has one in a warehouse on the town, and it must be out there for pickup later right now. This unimaginable fuck up solely actually value me about $160 for a reconditioned caliper, a four-mile Uber journey to choose 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 automobile now. And some hours of labor.
My neighbor’s cat stopped by on the finish of the day to cheer me up. I believe it labored. All of us make errors. We are able to repair our errors.
