Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 04:18:34 GMT From: wwwnopsamus-technologies.com (Dean) Subject: Re: Disk brake pad replacement
On Fri, 09 Feb 2001 22:20:30 -0500, just as I was about to see how much duct tape you REALLY need to stop a gerbil from exploding, Four Weis <mweinopsamcom> distracted me by babbling thusly: >Buy the manual first. You need a special tool, which I gave away when I >sold my Saab to screw the "self-adjusting" piston back in. I have an 86 model 900 sedan with this awkward piston necessity too. To get around this, I made my own tool, by butchering another tool. Somewhere in the garage, I have an electric polisher. Makita I think. Anyway it's all the same.... both the electric polisher and the angle grinder I have use the same mechanism for securing the arbor to the drive shaft: it's a thick steel spacer with the inside hole threaded to screw onto the motor shaft, and located mid-way in the annulus is a pair of holes, one either side, diametrically-opposed. To tighten/loosen the disk, you use the supplied locking tool. The locking tool is simply a "Y" with two posts coming out at 90 degrees, and if you look at it from the underside, it would look something like this (using the magic of modern technology and ASCII (tm), the new revolution in fixed width fonts, for your viewing pleasure): O O \ / || || || You push the posts into the holes of the spacer and rotate away to your heart's content. Gee, guess what else this tool can fit into? The pin spacing on my Makita tool was about 5mm too long to fit into the SAAB. A few turns with the bench vice to squeeze them closer together soon fixed that. Sure, the arms of the "Y" looked a bit worse for wear, but I now had a tool that would fit the piston. You can't use circlip pliers in the SAAB because you have absolutely no height available to play with. So get yourself a spanner for a Ryobi or Makita. Less than $5, and the added benefit is that you can get some stress-relief therapy while you're squeezing the crap out of it in the bench vice. As a visual aid, you can imagine it's your ex-mother-in-law's head. I look at the brake calipers on my 90-900T cab next to it, with their undo-one-bolt-and-flip-it-up-out-of-the-way design, which makes changing pads like popping toast into a toaster, and wonder, why the hell did they take SO long to get it right????
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