OK, it's been a while since I wrote anything in this forum, so I thought I better bring you up to speed with an on-going mechanical saga that might be of interest to some of you.
As you will probably recall, I had my Budweg re-manufactured brake calipers colour-coded to match my Ray's Racing bronze gearbox. The reason is quite simply that the gearbox and brakes are pretty much the only part of the Alfa mechanicals that you can see through my rear louvre panel, so they need to look the part. And they did – right up to the point where I put the brake fluid in.
As you can see, after all the nause of fitting a new handbrake cable, re-building both master cylinders, installing both calipers without damaging the paint and bleeding the brakes, THIS happened!
Thinking I must have inadvertently forgotten to tighten down the bleed screw, I re-bled the brakes, re-tightened both bleed screws and then cleaned off any excess fluid with engine degreaser, just to be sure.
I then put my new (patent-pending) adjustable seat side mounts to good use and literally STOOD on the middle pedal. A quick check around the rear calipers revealed the awful truth - both of the bleed screws were weeping fluid! I tightened them down as far as I dared and tried again, but it was no good – the brake fluid kept weeping out of each bleed screw and the pedal gradually became softer as more air got into the system.
I couldn't risk having any more fluid leach out onto the paintwork (by some miracle the fluid coming from the nearside caliper hadn't got onto the gearbox casing), so I drained the rear brake circuit completely and removed the bleed screws for inspection...
This is the nearside caliper bleed screw – a clear wear ridge on this one
And this is the offside bleed screw – man did I come close to disaster with this one!
The calipers were painted by a company called the Brake Caliper Specialists, and because I went for their super-deluxe service all the work was covered by a 4-year warranty. I got onto them and explained my problem; they weren't too surprised to hear about the leaking bleed screws and promised to re-work and re-paint the calipers under warranty. They even arranged for collection by courier at their expense. Of course that meant I had to remove the calipers again without damaging the gearbox paintwork! But I did manage it, and after removal from the car I was able to inspect the bleed screw bores and confirm that the tapered seat appeared to be pitted on both cases. A quick lapping-in of the taper seats and problem solved, or so I thought...
Last week I received news of a more worrying development. The RH caliper (the one that had the paint stripped off it) was pressure-tested on receipt, and at 2000psi the casting actually ruptured!
BCS think there may have been a hairline fracture in the casting, which might explain why more fluid leaked out of this caliper than the other one. What was bothering me is that the calipers BCS painted for me were re-manufactured units with zero miles on them. If I had been happy to accept an electroplated finish (which soon corrodes through) against the bronze/gold of the gearbox this could have happened out on the road!
This unexpected failure left me with another problem – with only one serviceable brake caliper I needed another RH one. Fortunately, I remembered that I had another caliper that was given to me by ace Minari pilot Mark Pollard. The intention was to rebuild it and use it to fix my original calipers' sticking handbrake mechanism, but I never got around to it and exchanged my old calipers for the Budwegs instead. As luck would have it, the spare caliper was a RH unit, had never been re-conditioned and apart from a bit of surface corrosion, was just as it left the factory.
BCS were quite relieved to hear the news, as Budweg are currently out of stock and other suppliers have drawn a blank (Alfasud? What's that?). The caliper was collected on Tuesday, and I am now waiting to hear the outcome. Can my old caliper be re-worked? Will I ever get the rear brakes to work again? Will our heroine manage to escape from the clutches of the evil Dr Doom..?
Stay tuned for the next exciting episode...
Lauren
If I didn't have a spare caliper for the correct side, I was planning to put a plea out on CAF as my very next port of call!
