Amazing pace
Entry posted by Wagoneer
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Crack on! She said that and meant the garden, not the Westfield. So, we spent my two days off rendering garden walls. Saturday was written off too, having to visit a secondary school in the morning and a meeting for a private commission in the afternoon.
Sunday (today) we laid 5m of brick paving and despite feeling physically broken, decided to do some work on the car too.
The afore mentioned calipers were toast - the pistons were very firmly stuck in the bores. Quickly calculating the time versus the cost I went for new ones, guaranteed easy remedy.
Some shiny parts turned up at work throughout the past week, including:
Rally Design (near Sittingbourne) came up trumps with a nice new pair of M16 calipers complete with all the fittings. Whilst I was at it, I also aquired a pipe flaring tool (as recommended on here) and a nice bending tool. Some of the bends I need are tighter than the tool does but it's going to be very useful to get me started.
Having removed the original nearside caliper and finding the connection between the flexible pipe and the copper pipe was loose, I got on with fitting the new part.
The fitting kit (above) went in easily with a little copper slip applied betwixt the back of the pads and the shims to stop any squealing.
All good there. Now I need to make the connecting pipe.
Having bought some 3/16th pipe and fittings from Halfords I set about ignoring the sticker on the pipe pack (Only to be fitted by a professional) and got working.
This is the pipe cutter I used to trim the copper pipe to length. It's useless for plumbing pipe but great for this. The cut is clean and looks like this:
Next I used the flaring tool. having watched the video on Youtube from the manufacturer, the quality of the flaring was superior to those achieved by much cheaper devices.
Pipe fed into the block. A bolt is then screwed into the end to push the brake pipe into the correct position, then it's removed and the next part of the tool is applied.
This part winds in and makes the flare. Clearly I was on form as I remembered to put the fittings on the pipe prior to making the ends 
Now it's bending time. Cue the bending tool.
This is a baby version of the tool used by plumbers etc, a set of U shaped channels that ease the pipe into the required bend. It's a doddle to use and helped me produce this:
That's it. Now to fit it to the car and start on the offside. Unless I get some work done during the week not much will happen for a while as work is off to Paris next weekend for a jolly! It's not all doom though as we're doing a tour of the city in Citroen 2CVs! That'll be fun.
Hopefully if the rain holds off during the working week evenings I'll fit the other caliper as I employed a cunning plan to buy some worklights on a tripod. The story to the purse holder suggested that with lights I can work on the parquet floor in the conservatory at night and get it done quicker.....
Until next time...
No wait! Having fitted the pipes to the caliper I encountered two problems. The male end fitting wasn't quite long enough meaning the formed end of the pipe was not quite held firmly enough so I've ordered some new longer fittings to solve that problem. The other problem being I'd made the wrong flare on the female end. This too was easily remedied as I then made two more pipe sections with the correct flares on each end! Now that I've ordered the longer male fittings, I'll be making two more pipes
Also, upgraditis has struck - I simply must have braided hoses from the caliper up to the union inside the bodywork.
So really, until next time, when the new parts have arrived...
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