BRAKES CALLIPERS

We have been ensconced in our country house for  a week now, we house sit once a year, whilst good friends, the owners, go way down South for a month. The big plus is that there is a very large, heated, brightly lit and well equipped shed in the back garden.

I usually make good use of  this facility and this year it coincided with refurbing the brakes on the Stag. Before we left home I removed the discs from the brake callipers and blew out the two pistons from each calliper by using  the airline from my compressor, I managed to bruise my left thumbnail as the first piston suddenly popped out, after that I was a little more careful.

 I carefully transported all the bits into my temporary work shop and thoroughly cleaned everything using brake cleaner after removing the old rubber seals and thin, very rusty, retaining rings that held the dust seals in place. All was going well, one set of new rubber seals fitted and the thin dust seal metal retaining ring fitted. Beginners luck I guess as when I tried to fit the next retaining ring I just couldn't get it to sit inside the groove in the calliper and I damaged two of the rings beyond use in trying. The photo shows one of the old rusty rings and one of the new ones I damaged along with the new rubber seals and rings. I seriously considered that I would have to buy two new or reconditioned callipers.

The next day I brought back from my garage a few more tools and I was able to gently coax the last bright metal retaining ring from the refurb kits into place, that was a relief.

 I had hoped that the pistons, when cleaned and polished could be reused, but on close inspection, although the actual sealing surfaces looked OK there was two much rust elsewhere, so I decided to order new ones and another refurb kit to replace the metal rings that I had buggered.

All arrived now and using the method previously adopted the last two metal rings were eased into place. I lubed the new pistons with brake fluid and one by one pushed them in by hand as far as I could and then I used a G clamp to push them fully in.

After I carefully masked off all the bits that I didn't want to paint, like the new pistons i started to spray with special high temperature calliper paint.

The paint takes much longer to dry than normal spray paint, so after three coats I will leave it overnight to harden before I turn the callipers over and spray three coats on the underside.

Callipers nice and shiny now and just have the brake pads to fit, then ready to take back to my cold garage to refit to Stella. that will be the start of putting it all back together. I still have lots of rubbing down in the engine bay yet before I can respray, but warmer weather seems along way off at the moment.