Oh Well, Them’s The Brakes…

With the engine off gallivanting around the machine shop, we decided today to find something new to blow money on fix.

Remember the Craigslist ad for the Mustang? The one that said something along the lines of

New brakes all around…

We figured “hey, it has new brakes. Sure, the car has sat but we’ll just put some brake fluid in and we’ll be all set, right?”

Right?

So…. not so much.

Our first indication something was wrong was the brake master cylinder above. What looks like rust on the bottom of the right chamber was actually a non-trivial layer of sludge – not something you’d like to see inside a hydraulic system.

Our second indication something was wrong was looking taking off the front passenger wheel to look at the disk brakes underneath. The pad looked….bad.. and wasn’t allowing the rotor to spin freely.

The third indication something was wrong came after ordering a brake rebuild kit from the auto parts store and coming home with a new master cylinder. The old master cylinder’s lines to the brake distribution block were quite happy where they were thank you and refused to move. We convinced one to turn with a vice grip and the other with a reciprocating saw.

And the last indication of the day something was wrong with the brake system was brake fluid inside the power brake booster. That’s, uh… not supposed to happen.

So, adding brake fluid has turned into:

• A new master cylinder
• Brake rebuild kits for the front wheels (the rears will come later)
• A new power brake booster
• And a new set of pre-formed brake lines

Strictly speaking, the set of new brake lines (just to replace the one we had to cut) wasn’t necessary, but as it turns out it’s cheaper to buy the kit of all of them than to buy the tools and materials needed to make a new one. It might have been cheaper to have it made custom, but probably not by a lot and at that point we’d still have 50 year old brake lines everywhere else in the car.

Considering the money we’re spending to make the car go, I decided it was worth spending some to make it stop too.