The Lord giveth...

...and Murphy taketh away.

YET DESPITE THAT, I did manage to avoid any permanent disfigurement, and am able to come in this morning and peck upon this glorious computing machine and bore all of you to tears! Surely that must count as a weekend well spent.

Or not.

In any event, I have been having some brake problems of late. The front rotors were shaking, and the left rear rotor was making a horrible grinding sound that reverberated all through the car, so a couple of weeks ago I was overjoyed to get an email from IPD that mentioned they were having one of their much too infrequent "no shipping charge" sales, and I ordered some new PBR semi-metallic pads and a set of Brembro front rotors.

Friday, my great big (heavy) package of brake junk (and my new cupholder!) arrived just as predicted, and in a flurry of joy I ripped open the box to make sure everything was there, and it was, and set in to get started on the necessary dismantling right away.

As I was getting the car situated and finding my floor jack, I was still bothered by the one oversight in the whole process. When I had ordered my parts, I decided not to order a set of rear rotors. I don't really know why, other than I think I thought the ones already on the car could be turned and reused.

I don't really know why I thought this.

Especially after all that horrible grinding noise, noise that I knew couldn't be caused by anything other than a pad that had worn down to the backer plate. That can't be good for a brake rotor. Yet, for some reason, I didn't order them. And to make things worse, I really couldn't add them to the order later, without paying a huge tariff for shipping. The only way I managed to get this other stuff on the cheap in the first place was the sale--let me tell you this--shipping from Oregon to Alabama is outrageous. So, after I decided not to order them (to keep from paying an extra billion dollars to have them shipped) I figured I would just make do with what I had. If the rotors were too thin, I'd just have to have them smoothed out a bit, then order the rotors and install them later. Which is just a real messed up way of doing things.

But, as we have now thoroughly established, I Am A Moron.

Anyway, out with the wheel chocks, the jackstands, the jack, various wrenchy things, and off we go.

Jack up rear, set the stands in place, take off the wheels, yikes--my left rear rotor look like it had been scrubbed by a comb with diamond teeth--great big deep grooves running round and round. Yep--I could see there was no more friction material left on the pad. Aside from the piece of metal it had been attached to.

Took out the pads, took off the brake caliper, and measured the rotor thickness. Wow. 8mm on the left, about 8.4 on the right. Both sides were 2mm thinner than the minimum thickness. I really should have ordered rear rotors.

By this time, Reba had gotten home and I asked her to call the parts place to see if they could turn rotors--I thought I had seen this as one of their services sometime in the past. No--apparently it was a mirage or something. ::sigh:: They had some other places that could, but it was going to mean a lot more running around on Saturday, which I did NOT want to do.

Oh well.

I still had other things to do while there was still enought daylight, though, so I went ahead and made a run down to the foot of the hill for some brake cleaner in a spray can. Just out of curiosity, I asked the gangly kid at the counter if they had rear rotors for an '86 Volvo 240. "Yessir, we have two in stock."

You could have knocked me over with a flare nut wrench! What are the odds of them having something like that--IN STOCK!? He brought them out, and they looked beautiful--smooth and round and glistening and--ahem. Well, they looked real good.

Home, singing the 'Happy, Happy, Murphy's Law Don't Live Here' song. Which was obviously a mistake. I knew I should just be quietly grateful and not tempt fate. Because Fate is a real jerk when it comes to stuff like brakes.

Got to the house, found out there was one more piece of hardware to remove before getting the rotor off. I had looked in the shop manual and in my Haynes book, but neither of them showed a heavy bronze tail that was attached to the rear of the caliper. I think it's a shield of some sort, but with it in place, I couldn't move the caliper far enough out of the way to get the rotor off. SO, that had to be gotten off, which meant I had to bolt the caliper back in place enough to get some leverage.

Did that, pulled the passenger side, then went back around to the driver's side and doused the parking brake apparatus with brake cleaner (whew! highly aromatic hydrocarbons!), slid the new rotor on, and noticed it was getting sorta darkish outside.

Which is what happens at night.

Not going to get it all done this evening, obviously.

Grabbed my shop light and started the replacement on the right side. Undo extra hardware, pull rotor, douse the parking brake apparatus again. Boy, there's a lot of gunk in there. Spray. Spray, spray, sprrrrrrrray. Popped the new rotor on.

Ouch.

Felt like something had pinched my butt. I was sitting on the driveway with my legs akimbo as I was working, and it felt like I had sat on a pin. Started putting the caliper back on.

Ouch.

OW!

Whatever that was that was pinching me really was hurting. I grunted and pulled on the wrench and OWWWW! That's BURNING! And now my left calf was burning, too. I leaned over and felt the bottom of my thigh and felt something wet on my jeans. OUCHBURN! "What is going on!?" I thought to myself.

It was then that I noticed I was sitting on one of the lateral joints in the driveway. And then I noticed that all of the vast amount of brake cleaner I had doused the mechanism with had puddled up on the driveway right underneath the brake, and at that exact spot was the lateral joint in the concrete. And that lateral joint seemed to be tilted at just the right angle to allow the huge puddle of brake cleaner (Caution: Highly flammable--avoid skin contact) to run toward the place I had only moments before been sitting. It then stopped when it found my buttock, and was handily soaked up by my jeans.

And made my right buttock and thigh and my left calf feel as though someone had gotten after me with a flamethrower.

I jumped up and started doing the 'Murphy's Law Strikes Again' tap dance, and ran inside and up the stairs to get in the shower before I suffered further damage to my fleshy backside. I ran into our bathroom, and lo and behold, Catherine was in the shower.

"CATHERINE!! I need you to get out! Daddy's got stuff on his leg and it BURNS! Please get OUT!"

She opened the door and looked out at me.

"CAT! PLEASE. GET. OUT."

She got out and stood on the bathmat.

"Catherine. I have stuff on my pants that is making my leg HURT REALLY BAD! I need you to leave the room so I can wash my legs off before I have to GO TO THE HOSPITAL! Please LEAVE!"

"But Mama told me to get in here and bathe before the pizza gets here."

"SUGAR! I KNOW you want to bathe, I'll let you back in in just a minute, but I have GOT TO GET IN THERE!"

She pouted and stalked out of the bathroom wet and nekkid, and I started ripping my pants off and stumbled into the shower.

Ahhhhhh.

Luckily, no permanent damage to my delicate undercarriage, but I do have a newfound respect for caustic chemicals.

I put on some different pants and finished getting my tools and stuff back inside for the night. I hated leaving the back end of the car up in the air overnight--it just looks rather low-class for such a fancy high-tone place like my neighborhood, but frankly, I'd had enough excitement for the night, and figured daylight would be better to work on things.

Got my real shower after supper, and in a fit of domesticity, made sure to take ALL the clothes out of the hamper and downstairs so that there would be no sudden CLOMP of laundry baskets on the bathroom floor Saturday morning.

And sure enough, there wasn't, and a certain wife of mine actually allowed me to sleep all the way until 8:30!

Hooray!

And then, time for more car repair!

Hooray!

SATURDAY

Up out of bed, put on clothes, go downstairs, go outside, see that no one has dared touch my precious rear-wheel-less heap, survey what must be done during the day.

Set in to work.

Finish getting rear calipers bolted on, install new pads, put wheels back on, remove jackstands, lower car. It all sounds so very easy--and when you get right down to it, each of the individual tasks IS easy. However, when you have all of them to do in sequence, and you keep having to interrupt the flow of work when you realize you left your 14mm wrench on the other side of the car, and you have to get up and go around and get it and then come back and then you realize you also need your hammer and you have to go get that, well, all of that combined gets to be somewhat fatiguing.

I need a monkey.

Nice little beast to go get me stuff that I forget. Of course, monkeys tend to poop on things. And I don't know how you'd train one to get you a pair of slip joint pliers instead of a pair of wire pliers. And they'd be screeching and chittering when they weren't doing something. And they'd probably want to lick up antifreeze. Maybe I just need an assistant. Boy would do, except he isn't at the age where cars are interesting. None of the girls want to help, except for Rebecca, and then only for about five minutes. They will get me ice water, though, which is nice.

Maybe I need a robot. Who looks like Catherine Zeta Jones.

Nah, then I'd never get anything done. Unless--unless I program the robot to do car repair! Hmmm. I think I might be on to something...

Either that, or I have breathed too many petroleum distillates.

ANYway--back on with the wheels, and lower it down, and move on to the fronts.

Jack up one side, jackstand, jack up other side, jackstand, wheels off, pads out, calipers off, rotors off, rotors on, calipers on, pads in. It sounds so simple in retrospect, but all of the grunting and hammering and torquing and sweating and getting up to go get stuff I forgot wore me out.

As for the front rotors, they were worn slap out, too. They'd gotten a goodly amount of warp in them, so the pedal vibrated violently every time I put on the brakes hard, and they measured 18mm. Again, both were about 2mm too thin, just like the rears. Apparently all four rotors were the original ones, so I guess that's pretty good for 225,000 miles.

Anyway, taa-daaaa--pretty brakes!



Things to remember--degrease the rotors before you put them on, including the inside of the rear rotors. (Just don't sit in brake cleaner.) Be sure to put a thin layer of silicone brake grease on the back of the pads, on each side of the shims, in the pin holes, and on the pins.

So, I had everything put back together by about 12:30 or so--EXCEPT.

You might recall that a while back I had bought some upper firewall and lower subframe braces from an old GT model on eBay. The top ones are no problem to install, but the bottoms are a different story. Due to the difficulty, I had not gotten a chance to put them on. But, here it was, all jacked up with no wheels. If I was going to put them on, this was the time.

Obviously, however, they can't go on easily.

And by now, I was feeling woozy. 90 degrees, humidity like breathing though a wet blanket, no breakfast, and lots of exertion.

Anywho--for those who haven't seen them, the braces are simple large diameter tube bars with flattened ends and bolt holes. There is already one set of holes in the frame on the crossmember, but the rear mount holes have to be drilled into the rear control arm bracket. Which is difficult under the best of circumstances, but much harder when you find you haven't got the car jack up quite high enough, and the stuff you're drilling into is so hard you can barely even dent it with a center punch, and when you DO get the drill started, little hot shards of metal shavings rain down onto your arm, and then later lodge themselves in your scalp. (Luckily, after cooling down.)

But, despite the travails, I did manage to get two holes drilled in the appropriate spots underneath the car. There is probably a way they are supposed to align--I have seen them both straight, and slightly angled as on the IPD website. I figured angled would be better, but I don't have any way of confirming that.

Anyway, I used a center punch, but couldn't get more than the tiniest dimple. The drill bit was a Black and Decker on that has a small pilot tip on it that makes it a bit easier to drill. It was tough, but it did get through.

Then, there was the bolting on. Which was made difficult by the lack of access. I wound up removing the bones from three of my fingers so they could wiggle into the space so I could hold a wrench on the top and bottom of the nut-bolt combo, but by gum, I did get those silly things installed. Even better is the fact that I actually CAN feel a slight difference in the ride and handling!

Or maybe it's just wishful thinking of a highly delusional variety.

Or maybe I'm just a moron.

In any event, here are a couple of pictures of the passenger side bars--

Here's the whole bar,



and here's a closeup of the rear mount.



After all that trauma, the wheels were reinstalled, the jackstands removed, the tools put away, and it was time to go test the brakes and make sure I didn't kill myself.

OH! And I installed my cupholder!

Off down to the foot of the hill. Soft, slow. Easy--not too hard--don't want to glaze them over!

Perfection.

Not a squeal, not a squeak, not a groan, not a grind, not a wobble, not a wiggle.

Anyone who comes here for Volvo information has probably already learned that Volvos are notorious for loud squeaky brakes, and yet, despite everything, I had managed to get everything stuck back together and lubed just right so that I was spared that distress. ::shakes fist at Murphy::

I drove up to Target and turned around, then figured I would go back to Winn-Dixie and treat myself to a can of Coke, which I would put in my brand new cupholder. Got there, pulled up to the curb, hopped out with my crisp dollar bill, stuck it in the machine and it spit it back out. Five times. ::Murphy smiles:: I did have a quarter in the car, so I went back and got it and bought a cheapo Diet Chek, which is just as good as a Diet Coke.

Cupholder works just fine.

On back to home, feeling quite satisfied, but still, there was one thing left to do.

Cleanup.

My pretty little shiny trim rings were dirty, and most especially the one on the rear where the pad had worn away. The dust that came off was full of iron shavings, which had coated the trim ring with a fine layer of rusty stuff. Can't have that.

SO, as I teetered on the brink of passing out from fatigue and heat and foodlessness, I got the tires and wheels all sparkly again. Finally got completely done around 3.

Stuff I noticed while I was under the car?

I need a new center driveshaft mount.

I need new front shocks.

I need a job that pays a million bucks a year.