Them's the Brakes

Spent part of yesterday replacing the front brake pads on the ZX2. It was the first time I had ever worked on sliding-pin calipers, and I don't have a manual for that car. So, like any good cou-rouge, I bought the pads, studied the layout, and dug in to the repair.

Let me say this. I could not find any good, free how-to manuals for that repair on the web. Maybe it's just me, and my search efforts were lame. However, I did take lots of pictures as I went, documented my errors, and plan to build a Powerpoint presentation of my efforts. Anybody with a later Escort or Tracer should find that useful; the total repair cost was about $30 and, once you have an idea how to proceed with confidence, takes less than a half hour per side.

It was a bit of an adventure. There was one potentially serious flub -- I destroyed a retaining spring on the first side I worked on -- when I attempted to fix the spring by creating a replacement part with some spring wire. That repair was superceded by the discovery on the second wheel that an even more critical spring had broken in use, and I had to run out and buy a new spring set for the calipers. It actually allowed me to comment on how to replace the caliper springs without removing the caliper from the car.

The nicest part of the whole exercise was this, though. For the first time in many, many years, I was able to work on my car inside my garage. It is starting to feel like the house has finally been put back together again.