As you know, the saga of my rear brake calipers is long and tortuous, so here is the abridged version. The Earth had cooled and the dinosaurs came, and my caliper bleed screws were leaking fluid all over my fresh paintwork. With no news of my calipers from BCS I bought 3 pairs of used Alfasud calipers from Graham at scrap value (thanks Graham!) and had the best pair media blasted to remove all of the rust and old paint. While he was at it, my friend Neville used one of those natty induction heaters to loosen up all of the bleed screws and pipe fittings, but we left them in place so that none of the blasting media would get into the drillings. I completely dismantled one of the calipers so I could figure out the internal workings, where the seals were, how the adjusters worked, and using that as a guide, carefully rebuilt the cleaned calipers with new seals and lashings of Castrol Red Rubber Grease
Once fully rebuilt, I de-greased the outside with brake cleaner and sprayed on etch primer, followed by two coats of Rays Racing Bronze to match the gearbox. When I bought the Rays Bronze paint I also purchased a can of 2K aerosol lacquer to finish them off. Now I know what you are thinking – 2-pack, in a rattle can? It’s true – when you are ready, you punch a button on the base of the can and it releases the hardener into the clear coat. You shake like crazy for 2 minutes and then you are ready to go. You get between 4 and 6 hours of pot life, which is more than enough to get several coats on, leaving 10 minutes or so to flash off between coats. Target thickness is a uniform 50 microns. I always measure paint thickness, don’t you?(!)
The end results looked pretty good considering it was my first attempt at a full caliper rebuild. After leaving the calipers for a week to harden off I took them down and carefully filed off one or two runs that would have prevented the caliper sitting squarely on the gearbox or the pads from sliding into place. I then went through the painfully familiar process of refitting them to the gearbox, bolting on the discs and routing the handbrake cable into place (I decided to leave my handbrake return spring mod for another day). I fitted yet another pair of Goodridge Speed Bleeders to the calipers (the previous pair having been ruined when fitted to the last effort from BCS – more on them later), and gingerly refilled the system with fresh DOT 4.
The brakes leak not a drop. They bled out absolutely fine. Absolutely no suggestion of leakage, even under full pressure. It is such a relief, I’ve become so paranoid about brake calipers leaking. This experience has completely restored my confidence.
In fact, I was so enthused that I refitted the driveshafts and torqued them all up, with the added bonus that the handbrake is working really effectively too!
Anyway, here are a couple of pictures I took last week. I’ve since fitted the brand new pad retaining clips which finish the job off nicely.
The dreaded handbrake cable!
The offside brake caliper (actually the nearside one, reversed in order to aid brake bleeding and pad adjustment from the rear of the car – not a view that Alfasud drivers normally see!)
So what of my original calipers back at BCS? My last communication with them was in January, when they told me they would get me a completion date for the work. I started getting concerned in February and sent them a number of increasingly agitated emails which elicited no reply.
After receiving a number of unsolicited special offer emails from them last week, I send them one last email asking for an update, and the following day the calipers arrived! Apparently my emails had been “treated as spam” and deleted. Mmmm.
BCS assure me that the calipers have been repeatedly pressure tested and are completely leak-free, but I won’t be swapping them out now. They were supposed to be leak-free before and look what happened. I have come to the conclusion that it was BCS re-drilling the bleed screw bore off-centre that resulted in the problem in the first place, and by not fitting inserts the issue is still likely to be there. Clearly BCS have done satisfactory work for other customers, but I have not been impressed with their standard of engineering and will have to put this particular episode down to experience
Anyway, on to more interesting things…
