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So can you guess what I was doing 30 minutes ago?

ZeroHour

Mod/Salad Tosser
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Joined
Feb 7, 2005
Messages
2,275
Location
Eastern PA
If you guessed I was on the entrance ramp of 33 to 80 and replacing a bolt on the caliper bracket that fell off while I was driving, then you sir (or ma'am) are closely related to god...

The long and short, I went to pick up my room mate to come back to ESU, and I forgot to turn to go pick him up ( :laugh: ) and had to turn around an a half-ass driveway. I noticed I heard some kind of knocking in the supension, kinda like the sway bar broke loose. So I checked the car, drove around, and brought it back to his house. It looked like my wheel well liner had lose a bolt, and we put on back in. Figured okay it was that slapping the firewall/fender.

Well about 30 miles later, I still think something was wrong, and we are merged from 209 onto 33, and we hear something fall from under the car. I figured it was a miscellanous road debre, theres alot of contrustion in the area right now.

At the light before the 33-80 merge I got to stop for the red. We hear a horrible screeching noise, and I'm like of crap. But the car stopped. Against better judgement, I drove off from the red towards the 80 merge. The car won't brake right, and I'm using the e-brake and downshifting. We get into traffice because of the bridge construction and I'm using the e-brake and putting it into park. so we decide to pull over and check it out. As I go to pull over the trans basically locks on the side of the road. The rotor was kinda blue and was hot. I knew from the noise that it was the brakes...

We half called triple A, because my roommates mom called. But I thought I could fix the car there on the road. AT this point I'm assuming the brake pad destoried itself (these are new bendix Tit. Met. II < 1000 miles). So we called her back and said know, cause I have my old brakes and can just swap them on if someone brings me the pads.

We setup and take the wheel apart in the construction part of the merge ramp! There was a constructino foreman Tom! :laugh: He came over to see what we are doing.

So i'm there using the ford jack (:blackeye: ) to lift the car on the decline of the merge ramp. We get the car in the air, rim off, and bingo! missing Caliper bolt! Now these brakes have been on since the end of August, and have about 800 miles on them! Not clue, but the wear is horrible on the rotor and brakes. So I need the caliper bolt, which I have, 30 miles back at home. About this time my roommate's sister and boyfriend show up, they were headed to the delaware to go night fishing. So we decided it be best if they took us back to my house to get the bolt, and drive all the way back to put the car together instead of having the car towed :blackeye:

We threw all the peices back together, bolt the tire back on, lower the jack, and get into their truck.We made it back onto 209 using a little short cut :laugh: and made it to an Advanced auto 10 minutes before closing.

By a stroke of luck, we actualy found a grade 8 bolt that matched! It had a 19mm head, so I needed to buy a socket (what a way to get a new tool ). So we head back, re-assmble the whole car and are back on the road in 20 minutes! Although the whole process took about 3 hours... :nonono: That will teach me for having all the parts to do the brakes, but not carrying extra bolts with me.

Needless to say these bolts were torqued, and held for a little over 800 miles, I really doubt that turn around in the crappy driveway knocked the bolt loose, but who knows...I'm just glad we hit the traffic merging into 80, or I would have gone onto 80 without safely function brakes...

What a day...

Oh and the Cavaliar is back on the road :laugh: Just in time for me to pull the Contour apart and go wtf on the brake system...
 
this is the second time i've heard of this happening, before that i've never heard of this happening to anyone!

i personally had the calipers off my old car atleast a dozen times, and while i never torqued them i did get them on there as tight as i possibly could...using a piece of pipe to lengthen my ratchet for better leverage.

i'm curious now, what's the torque spec for those bolts??
 
Happened to my buddies Trans Am too, but on those the caliper bracket is on the other side of the rotor so he only really heard it backing up :laugh:
 
this is the second time i've heard of this happening, before that i've never heard of this happening to anyone!

i personally had the calipers off my old car atleast a dozen times, and while i never torqued them i did get them on there as tight as i possibly could...using a piece of pipe to lengthen my ratchet for better leverage.

i'm curious now, what's the torque spec for those bolts??

wow sounds like you had a lot going your way...

Oddly enough I know of at least 2 other people that have had this happen, one being papatedroach and an f-150 that the caliper locked up the wheel when it came off on the interstate.
 
Well I lost the lower bolt, so the rotation pulled the caliper down into the rotor, and basically made Ford's worst brake system ever... The caliper looked fine, but I'm gonna tear it all down this weekend.

And its weird as hell that the bolt took so long. Like I could understand it backed out right after I did it, but I've driven ~800 miles of bouncy PA interstate :shrug:

oh and I don't remember the factory torque spec, but I put them down to the tune of 80 lbs. And I had done the brakes previously and did the same thing, with the same bolts, and that was on for about 2 years.

And the bolt did not shrear, the theards were perfectly fine, and the new bolt went right in, and tightened up!
 
caliper mounting bracket bolt is suppose to be torque to 45 ft/lbs iirc ... and the original bolts should have some lock-tite on them iirc also ...
 
Yeah i'm probably gonna loc-tite the bolts back in.

I need to pull the whole assembly apart so I can trade the pads back in on the warranty set. And same on the driver side rotor, I'm gonna get that swapped as well.

The other side seemed just fine...So I dunno why the hell just that bolt backed out. :nonono: Only thing I could thing of is that there is something wrong with the caliper that made vibrations that cause it to back out??? Not really sure.
 
Well just go finished doing an entire inspection the car. Looks like everything is okay except the rotor and the Caliper bracket.

The rotor was grinding into the caliper bracket, the Cougar S ones... It has a mild metal rash on the out lip of the rotor, but it did not grind very deep. I can still just read the impression from the manufacturer on the top of edge of the rotor. The caliper bracket looks like it was slapped around a bit, and is probably in worse shape then the rotor. It has no visible cracking, and maybe 1/32-1/16 grooves cut into the lower portion. I would say its safe to drive, but I need to give it a good look over and decide if I want to track down a new bracket.

Anyone thing I really need to replace the rotor? It really was just ground down a bit on the outside, and it didn't even exceed the depth of the manufacturing stamp. :shrug:
 
...Anyone thing I really need to replace the rotor? It really was just ground down a bit on the outside, and it didn't even exceed the depth of the manufacturing stamp. :shrug:

If it's not grooved to hell, you may be able to get away with it. For the relatively small price of a new rotor, might be worth it just to go new since you're in there anyway.

On a related note, I got a faulty rear passenger's Midas caliper years ago on my first Taurus SHO. I knew it was dragging just a little bit, as I could hear it scraping lightly intermittently. However, it must have tightened up a bit on the interstate during the ride to work one morning, as it was on fire when I arrived at work. I decided to do a walk around just to make sure all was well. Orange flames were leaping out between the spokes of the slicer wheels. I opened the trunk, grabbed the fire extinguisher, and put it out, thinking that if I'd just gone inside without seeing this, things could have gotten ugly. Midas replaced the caliper free of charge, and no damage was done by the fire -- I'm sure it only ignited once I stopped. :cool:
 
At the tune of 60 for a new rotor considering i'm making 100 every two weeks, it is kinda expensive for a new rotor. :laugh:
 
What an adventure Scott! Glad you were able to pull over safely.
I know exactly where you were too. :)

IDK, can you just have the rotor turned, just slightly to get the groove out of it? That may save you from buying another rotor.
 
Pics! Before and after.
PA140516.jpg

PA140519.jpg

Trippy...
PA140517.jpg
 
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