Brake Job

 I am exhausted, and my feet hurt. I did too much walking. My son in law came up today and I helped him put brakes on his 2015 ford escape. He did 99% of the work while I bitched, got dizzy a couple times, said ohfuckohshit a couple of times, and just generally made a nuisance of myself. 

The reason for us doing the brake job is the "mechanics" wanted $1200 to do it. What were they going to do for that? They wanted to replace ALL FOUR brake calipers for starters. No idea why, these work just fine. And replace 2 rotors for twice the price the stores want.

It wasn't too awful bad to do after we finally figured out how to compress the rear brake caliper piston.

The pistons nowadays have this turning thingamabob they do, so you can't just put a c-clamp on it and squeeze till it hollers stop. No sirree bob, you first try this special little tool:

The way it's supposed to work is you insert those pins into the holes on the brake caliper piston, push down while turning with a ratchet. And it's supposed to magically retract the piston so you can put it on over new brake pads.

What happens if the magical little cube doesn't fit into the holes on your piston, you ask. Well fuck shit piss I am glad you asked.

Then you find something that will fit into those holes. In our case I had a pair of needle nose pliers that kind of sort of worked. Twist and turn twist and turn but the piston does not compress no matter how hard you press while twisting and turning. 

Then I dug out my small adjustable spanner wrench. That worked great until you go 180°, then it hits the caliper and you have to reposition to the other side, then you have to twist with the needle nose pliers to enable the spanner to fit. I believe that may be where I was saying ohfuckohshitgoddamit a few times. We had about 45 minutes into this first brake caliper and the damn piston was not compressing.

So I had watched a couple of youtubes on this prior to starting, and I got to thinking about those. One guy had a much better tool for the job:

but I had no access to that. Another video I watched a guy used a pair of oil filter removal pliers to squeeze the piston and then he rotated it by grabbing with channel lock pliers and turning it. I don't have oil filter pliers, but I do have a big ass c-clamp, so we put the clamp on the piston, grabbed the piston top with channel lock pliers to turn, then tighten the c-clamp and then turn it again, and we were done in just a couple of minutes. Easy peasy japanesy.

As I said, once we figured that out, it went smoothly, sort of, afterwards.

But damn! My feet hurt.