Bit of a journey here…back ground, had new front pads installed at the dealer and all rotors turned roughly 10,000 miles ago, current mileage 117,000 miles. Right rear brake has been making a bit of a whistling sound under light braking for a while, thought it might have been dirt or something.
My parking brake wasn’t working that great, made an appt with the dealer for 1500 hrs, I asked the SW (service writer), is that enough time for you to work on this you close at 1700 hrs?, SW yes no problem. I showed up half hour early at 1430, then waited for two hours past my appointment time, service writer comes to me and says, “we verified the cable and linkages are all functional”, the tech tried to adjust the brake but it didn’t work. Me thinking to myself, well Ray Charles could have figured out the actuator system was working in a few minutes not two hours. Service Writer (SW) says you’ll have to bring it back in three weeks and I want to get a set of parking brake shoes just in case we need them, Me; Okay as long as I don’t have to pay for them if you don’t need them, SW; nope only if we need them. SW here’s an estimate of $750 if we have to put the shoes in it. Me; Okay let’s see what’s in there.
So I get on you tube university the next day and see how to adjust the top hat parking brake, get under the truck, little the little rubber plugs in the backing plate are dirty and have not been removed, pull them out, adjusters have no tool marks on them, gotta call bullshit on them attempting to adjust them. This is not an easy process, I had to make an adjustment tool out of a screw driver, then spend a couple hours adjusting them, success, parking brake works great. So I drop by the dealer to tell the SW hey I adjusted the parking brake shoes and that is working fine now, but I want to keep the appt since I suspect the right rear caliper is sticking (I have an extended warranty for another 33,000 miles), but my SW isn’t there. Talk to another SW and he tells me well we each have our own teams but let me pull up your ticket, he does and tells me “it says here install parts”, Me; Why would parts need to be installed until it’s known whether or not you’ll need them?
SW; I can’t answer that question you’ll have to talk to your SW. Me; okay that makes sense. About that time my SW comes back and I tell him the same story and he says okay well let’s get it apart and see what it needs. Me; Aight see you on my appt day 0730.
So now I’m left with the inescapable conclusion they’re trying to pull a fast one, very disappointing.
Yesterday I pull the rear wheels and pull the right rear caliper, the top slider pin is stuck, the bottom one is free, I used a crescent wrench to rotate it and get it free and find this under the little bellows.
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NICE.
I use a file to get off the heavy corrosion and petrified grease, then clean it up with a wire brush. Not great but serviceable since all of the working part of the pin has no corrosion. I used a .45 cal bore brush and Kroil penetrating oil to clean out the bore of the slider pin holes, rinsed with CRC Lectra-Motive contact cleaner and then blew out with compressed air and cleaned up the bellows, the rust was stuck to the sealing lip of the bellows.
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Then used the high temp brake silicone grease I got for the boat trailer and lubricated the bore and pin and packed the bellows.
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I then checked the other side and found this
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On the drivers side the upper pin was stuck and the lower pin was almost stuck. Cleaned them up and they were serviceable, lubricated them and put everything back together.
I checked the pads with a digital caliper and found .015”-.020” of taper from end to the other caused by the stuck pins, checked with my mechanic friend and he said run the pads they’ll correct themselves pretty quickly. My mechanic friend went on to say those are not warrantable items and they would have charged you for new pins, and probably would have wanted to put on a new set of pads. So I’m betting they’d have said I needed new parking brake pads as well as the caliper pins, maybe even calipers, pads and turning of the rotors, Cha Ching. I probably just saved myself $3000 grand by spending an afternoon working on my truck.
If I had done the brakes myself 10,000 miles ago, I would have serviced these caliper pins when I took it apart, that’s just common sense, apparently the tech who worked on these things didn’t think to check these pins, there’s no way these pins got this way in 10,000 miles. I know they had them apart because the shoes / pads had been switched on the drivers side rear, meaning the outboard and inboard pads had been switched as evidenced by the piston marks on both pads. This of course leads me to the fact I’ll have to check these pins front caliper pins at some point in the near future. They were supposed to have flushed the brake fluid / bled the entire system at that time as well, the fluid in the reservoir was definitely changed, but now my suspicion is up and so I’ll have to bleed the calipers and confirm the fluid is new and that they didn’t just pull the fluid in the reservoir and add new.
Needless to say I’ll be calling today to cancel my appointment for next week. I’m contemplating talking to the service manager about this situation and some other things that have happened and how this gives me concern about the competency of the work being done and pause as to whether or not to have any work done by them going forward. Five years ago they did work on my last truck and that service was great, but the quality of their work seems to have dropped off. Very disappointing to say the least. I don’t mind paying top dollar for top dollar work, but not the opposite.
