It's been a while since I've had any real car maintenance to talk about, aside from punctures, (both due to reliable cars and being bogged down in renovating and property work in seemingly every spare weekend
) but I paid a visit to Richard yesterday to fit the drop links for the Ion I've had kicking around in a box for over 9 months.
We were lucky with the weather which held until we finished and it was good to catch up again, as it was quite a while since the last visit!
As expected Mr A Grinder was necessary - we made a halfhearted attempt to remove the first one with a spanner and socket drive torx bit and it looked like it might work at first but we soon gave up with Richard putting the grinder with cutting disc to work. On the second droplink we went straight to the grinder and had that one out in a couple of minutes.
New ones were dutifully fitted and that was that part of the job done.
While the car was jacked up I wanted to look at the annoying rattly front right caliper, at which point we discovered the bottom caliper slide pin was completely seized/stuck in the housing.
This is the one that has the plastic/rubber sleeve that sits on a recessed shank on the pin, vs the top pin which is steel only. People may recall I had trouble with that getting stuck before due to the rubber going soft and squishy and then riding up on the shoulder of the pin, so back in January I got new rubber bushes and fitted them with some silicone grease:
https://www.frenchcarforum.co.uk/forum/ ... 8&p=563295
I actually didn't use the supplied grease (show in the picture in the thread above) but another silicone based grease which claimed to be suitable for the purpose which I thought would be better at reducing rattle, in hindsight maybe not a good choice.
The pin was totally resistant to being removed - it could be turned but was absolutely stuck solid as far as sliding in and out was concerned and I didn't think we'd be able to get it out, but after a lot of turning I finally managed to get it out. What I found was that the outside of the rubber bush was extremely sticky and I think the grease I used had gone sticky, this may have caused the rubber bush to ride up on the pin and get jammed between the pin and the hole. Also the bush seemed to have stretched and was now too long for the recess it is supposed to sit in!
I had noticed a few times recently that the front brakes didn't seem to be working nearly as well as they should for emergency stops where I was having to push the pedal a lot harder than you'd expect. Because regeneration takes care of the light braking and I tend to drive in a style that doesn't require heavy braking in that car, if the front brakes have lost sensitivity you don't really notice it in casual driving. In hindsight its clear that the bottom pin being seized would have been preventing the front brakes working properly and may have been holding them on slightly too.
We checked the left hand side and sure enough it had the same problem, although it wasn't jammed quite as badly. Considering I just fitted these new rubber bushes in January I was not too happy! Not sure what to do to get it back on the road I ended up trimming about 1.5mm of length off the bush (as both had stretched enough to be riding up on the shoulders of the pin) greased them again and put them back in - both are now sliding smoothly again but I don't know how long that will last so this is only a temporary respite.
Sure enough, on the way home again the right one is still rattling a bit although not as bad. Having given it some thought I'm highly inclined to replace the slide pins with all steel pins - in other words order a set of top pins and fit them in the bottom and not have ANY pins with this stupid rubber bush on them.
The top and bottom holes are identical and the back of the pins where the caliper bolts to are identical as well, so they'll happily fit.
I still really don't understand what the rubber bush is about - if it's an anti-rattle mechanism it's a complete fail as it doesn't stop it rattling!
In my opinion the risk of the rubber swelling and jamming between the pin and hole again and seizing is too great. Dumb design!
Of course with all metal pins it may rattle more so I think I should also fit the optional "Disc pad noise prevention kit", which is item 14:
Funnily enough I've seen what these look like in person as when I ordered the brake caliper repair kit (seals etc) they supplied the noise prevent kit by mistake before sending it back. I kinda wish I'd just kept it!!! They are basically full size pad backing shims with a kind of compressible rubbery material on the side that goes against the pad back - no doubt to damp squeal, (which I don't have a problem with) but the compressible nature of the material may help to prevent the caliper assembly from rattling as well.
Only £10 for this noise prevent kit, so if it works it's a no brainer to get it. So I think the next step is to get new metal pins and the noise prevention kit. At least I can guarantee then that that bottom pin wont ever get jammed again...
At motorway speeds there is sometimes a bit of vibration from the front which I haven't been able to identify - since freeing up that bottom pin the vibration seems to be mostly gone so I suspect the cause of the vibration was the seized pin not allowing the pad to sufficiently retract so any runout of the disc instead of pushing the pad clear on the first revolution would keep grabbing every time the disc went around as the pad would push back again.
While I was there we checked out a problem with Richard's Lexia - which didn't seem to work properly with his Peugeot. I tried my Lexia on the car, which worked perfectly with it, we then tried his VCI on my laptop - that also worked perfectly so we've narrowed it down to some software issue on Richards installation which is in a virtual machine, so I think he's going to do a fresh installation in a new virtual machine. I left a copy of all my install files so that he has known good installers that were used to install my working installation so I'm sure he'll get it sorted out.
In tyre news, it looks like I need to make another visit to Cooper Brothers next Saturday!
It seems that my new tyre has a slow leak. Well, when I say slow, it lost 10 psi in 2 weeks, and about 6psi in a single week.
By contrast the other three tyres lose only about 1psi in a whole month, if that. Basically the others don't leak at all, so 6psi in a week is a relatively bad "slow" leak in my opinion.
So back I go next weekend. They must get sick of all my return visits...!
I had to do a semi-emergency stop last night and the brakes nearly put me through the window. 
