We all make mistakes, right? Yesterday in the waning hours of sunlight after struggling with a car project for about five hours, I broke my car in a way that I’ve never seen before. Surely a consequence of fatigue, cold, laziness, and rush, I accidentally snapped the mounting ear off of my Audi’s driver side front brake caliper. And the funny thing is, I wasn’t even working on the car’s braking system at all, I was installing front lowering springs. It was all going so well, right up until it wasn’t.
Maybe some of you who have done suspension work on a MQB chassis Audi A3, Volkswagen Golf, or Jetta already know where I’m going with this. Or maybe it’s all going to be a surprise, I’m not sure. I’ll make another post about the suspension work once I get an opportunity to test out my new springs, but for now we’re going to sit in the moment and laugh about my fuck up.
I’ll be honest, I was feeling pretty good about this project and how smoothly it was going. I’d struggled a little with the driver’s side, but the passenger side went together pretty easily once I’d learned the tricks from the first side. The learning curve had a sharp fall off. The only minor hiccup I had during the installation process was when I was undoing the strut top nuts on the driver’s side and my 13mm ratcheting wrench fell into the black hole of abyss at the top right corner of the above photo. Wherever that hole leads to I can’t seem to find and my magnet wasn’t strong enough to find the wrench again. I guess it’s a sacrifice to the wrenching gods.
So, how did the caliper break? Well, you may know that in order to get the knuckle low enough to extract the strut assembly, you need to undo the 24mm CV axle bolt. In order to do that you need to stop the assembly from turning, and there are a few ways to do that. Normally you would do this with the car on the ground and the weight of the car on the tire stopping the spin, then pop off the wheel center cap and crank away. The center bore of my OZ Rally wheels is too small to allow the 24mm socket through, so that won’t work for me. Another method is to have a friend stand on the brakes so you can apply the necessary torque to the bolt. My wife was around and amenable to helping, but instead of bothering her I decided to go a third direction. I jammed a quarter-inch extension into the vanes of the side of the rotor and torqued against that.
That’s not the dumb part. The dumb part was when I forgot the quarter-inch extension in the rotor. After checking and double-checking that everything was properly torqued and back where it needed to be, I cleaned up my tools, put away my rolling stool, bolted the wheels back on, removed the jack stands and wheel chocks, and got in the car to reposition it for “finished” photos.
When I sat in the car and fired it up on the car’s 100-horsepower electric motor it initially wouldn’t budge. “Oh, right,” I thought to myself, “I put on the electric parking brake.” So I turned off the brake and popped the car back in reverse. After initially binding, the car quickly broke loose and I was rolling, but my brake pedal pressure felt weird, so I stopped, put the car in park, and got out again.
I’ll admit I didn’t immediately know what had gone wrong, but I knew something was wrong. I got down on the ground to look around underneath the car for a forgotten jackstand or something that would have bound up against the car. Then it hit me like a sack of bricks. Once I remembered what I’d forgotten I just started laughing like a maniac in my driveway. The sun was going down and my perfect plan of getting out for a beautiful photo shoot in the gloaming of the afternoon was shot through.
Well, nothing to do but assess the damage. Jacked back up, wheel back off, I saw the gronked brake caliper and my heart sank. You know that feeling when everything is going so great and then something absolutely devastating happens? It somehow hurts worse, right? There’s nothing to be saved here, unfortunately. The cast aluminum would be tricky to weld properly, so I’m not getting away without a replacement caliper. I guess this is going to be a costly repair.
After a hot shower to clean the suspension gunk off of myself, and the despair out of my brain, I got to work. After confirming I would be able to bleed the brakes myself without a Volkswagen/Audi computer, I poked around to find which of the many auto parts stores in my area had a brake caliper available nearby. It turns out NAPA has one in a warehouse in town, and it should be available for pickup later today. This incredible fuck up only really cost me about $160 for a reconditioned caliper, a four-mile Uber ride to pick it up, a quart (or less) of brake fluid from my stash, and a shiny chrome vanadium quarter-inch extension. Oh, and that 13mm wrench that’s part of the car now. And a few hours of labor.
My neighbor’s cat stopped by at the end of the day to cheer me up. I think it worked. We all make mistakes. We can fix our mistakes.
