Braking bad to braking good

Braking bad to braking good

With an MOT rapidly approaching I decided to clean up the lip on my brake discs. However on measuring I noticed that my rear discs were beyond their minimum limit and the fronts weren't far off either. Pretty frustrating when the pads are virtually new!

I opted for Apec Discs and Pads as a cost effective but high quality replacement. The linked items are for the rears that I bought through eBay. The fronts I managed to get from Halfords.

The new front discs came unprepared so I picked up a tin of heat resistant paint and sprayed the outside edge and hub to make them look a bit smarter and hopefully protect them over the long run.

Any over run onto the disc surface isn't a problem as it will rub off anyway so there was no need for masking.

The rear discs came prepainted and so I left them as they were for now. As the rear discs are smaller the mismatch in colour between front and rear doesn't really matter.

I hope to paint the calipers soon so they will look pretty smart once completed.

Fitting the discs is fairly simple so I won't bore you with it. A Haynes manual is useful for the torque figures and pointing you in the right direction for caliper removal.

On the subject of caliper removal, they are on there, I mean really on there!. I snapped my 3/8"th brake bar so bought a compressor and impact gun to beat them off (oo er). In the end a long 1/2" brake bar and a heat gun won the day. 

The compressor is cool though so I'm not too sad about the huge amount spent on that. 

Once the calipers were off it was a piece of cake to get everything apart, and the new discs on. Whilst I had everything apart I cleaned up the calipers with a wire brush. This will help later when I try to paint them.  

Another note is that the wiring for the pad ware sensor is easily damaged. The plug that sits in a bracket on the back of the near side caliper had cracked through where it slides onto the bracket on my van. I have glued it back together for now but will need to replace the loom or repin a new plug at some point in the future.

That all aside, discs and pads are on and a fairly dull blog post can now be uploaded!