Friggin' Expedition - Day 1

I've been slacking. Well, not really, just on the blog. In an effort to right my slackassitry, I'm posting about the recent hell that was 'a quick brake job' on a 1998 Ford Expedition. First, let's see why dad's beast of a ride was in my garage.

A couple weeks prior, my dad had mentioned a noise he heard when stopping. Normally, I'd look at it but I've been crazy busy so he did the next best thing and stopped by good 'ole Car-X. Now, this is the shop that's shafted a friend by screwing up his custom exhaust, argued with me when I had them do an alignment and it started pulling to the left and attempted to charge another friend $800 for a brake job he had completed for $225 at another shop. I'm not saying they're bad, I just won't take any more of my stuff there.

The guys at the shop pull off the wheels, crunch some numbers and come up with $900+ to fix his brakes. What the heck? Apparently, he had chewed through his pads, destroyed the rotors, had two rusted brake lines, and two busted calipers. Add in labor and they're rich. I couldn't believe it so I reluctantly told him to bring it by. I mean, how bad could it really be? I could probably have it fixed in an hour. (Hindsight: Fatal flaw in logic discovered - Error #1)

Long story short, day 1 entailed pulling off the front wheels by hand and removing the brake caliper & bracket with a hugified breaker bar (*sigh*, how I missed my air tools at 9pm). I also had my dad buy brake lines from a Capital City Ford in case they needed replaced (Hindsight: Error #2).

Well, the driver-side brake line is jacked up. So much for using stainless steel because it "stands up to the elements." It must be gremlins!

Well, the passenger side doesn't look bad. At least I don't have to change that one. (Hindsight: Error #3)

I pulled off the calipers with the brackets. How the heck do I separate these? The calipers have a funky bolt head... wait, that's not a funky bolt head. It's a T45 that's been chewed up because someone didn't know what tool to use. Thanks moron! I set these aside until I could make some noise. Maybe the rotors will come off. Since it was quiet hours, I gave them a few whacks with my 2lb solid rubber mallet. All I got was a bunch of rust to come off. I wrote the rotors off for noisy time and packed it up for the night.