Our car developed a seized front right disc brake which was causing the disc to heat up alarmingly, not only that it was costing us money in petrol pushing the car harder to gain the same speed.... So I bought a brake refurbishment kit which replaces all the seals and rubber bushings....
It's not a hard job to do, you just need to remove the brake caliper from the wheel and push the piston out and clean everything up in there, replace the seals and away you go..... normally ......
The piston proved harder than I thought to get out... I eventually reverted to pushing it out via hydraulic pressure on the existing brake line.... and at the moment the piston left the piston chamber..... I was doomed :( but I didn't know it then.... I only discovered how doomed I was later...
the worst part was figuring out that you can only put the dust seal on AFTER you have pushed the cleaned and lubricated piston all the way in which took about an hour after various combinations I was ready to fit it back on the car and bleed the brakes......
But it wasn't to be....... I was defeated by a minuscule bleed screw which had last been opened in about 1998... it was rusted solid into the brake housing/piston chamber..... it didn't matter what I tried I couldn't get it loose or get it to even move.... I could have used brute force but all that would have done was ripped it clean off the piston housing......
Which presented me with a problem.... without being able to bleed the brakes they wouldn't work as they are intended....So the only thing I could do was to fill up the piston chamber with brake fluid through the tiny hole where the brake line attached (not an easy thing to achieve) and "try" and make it air free.... then reattach the brake line and hope the braking on that disc was good enough....
unfortunately it wasn't although they work there is a lot of travel in the brake pedal and the brakes fade.... naturally because they aren't air free....
My father is arranging a visit to a blacksmith to remove the offending bleed screw by welding a nut onto it and getting it out....and putting a new bleed screw in if that fails it's a new caliper I'm afraid and they ain't cheap :(
Which has more than hacked me off because I've already spent more than I wanted to on the refurbishment kit and pressure bleed system.......
Moral of the story..... Always have a exit strategy before embarking on something which might not work.....
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