Learning about VW brake calipers

 The challenge in keeping up with the blog is remembering to take pictures of stuff so I have something to show you.

Remember our 2005 VW Golf TDI?

Pictured here at ChowdaQ in 2016 this is the car I've owned the longest. Actually it might be in the running for the vehicle I've owned the longest. I think I got it in 2015.

So the old Golf is hard on brakes, especially the rears. I've posted a bunch of times about doing brakes on that car. One of the things special about brakes on a newer VW is that the rear calipers need to be twisted as the piston retracts. An easy(ish) way to do that is with a tool like this:

And I've done it several times now, the tool quickly pays for itself and I don't think it was terribly expensive.

The problem is that every time I've done the brakes on this car I've ended up with terrible pedal feel and the parking brake didn't work well.

Recently the pedal started to pulse badly during braking so I knew it was time for yet another brake job. Fortunately the parts aren't too expensive so I ordered up new pads and rotors all around. At the same time I knew I'd have to address the parking brake which didn't work at all.

After finishing the brake job I knew I was in trouble, pedal feel was AWFUL. Pedal goes straight to the floor. I know what you're thinking "air in the lines" but I hadn't opened the system so where would the air have come from? Plus the parking brake didn't work at all.

So, since I'd never done it I figured I'd replace the parking brake cables. Not a terrible job and they're weren't too expensive. Sadly, after the job was done nothing had changed. So I decided to sleep on it for a couple nights.

Well, theres the problem. Sure, right. Let me explain...

What we're seeing here is the rear of the passenger side caliper. At the bottom left of the picture there is a pair of vice grips attached to the parking brake actuator. The actuator is fully extended in this picture, so its bottomed out but isn't causing the brake pad to contact the rotor.

When I retracted the piston I retracted it all the way so the new pads would clear. In doing so I've retracted the piston too much so the piston isn't moving enough to do its job. Disc brakes are self adjusting so eventually the piston would adjust itself but commonly the adjuster gets a little stuck. I could actually see that in the parking brake actuator, it didn't retract well. A little squirt of oil helped. I cycled the parking brake a couple hundred (no joke) times but it just wasn't adjusting, or at least not enough to matter.

Heres the fix, you're looking at the caliper standing on its side. The cube thing inside the caliper has little nubs on it to engage the piston. Normally to retract the piston you turn it clockwise while pushing it in. The other tool won't work for that since you need to turn counter-clockwise which would also retract the tool.

Here my thumb is pushing down on the cube thing while I turn it with a big screwdriver. It takes a lot of force but fortunately it only needs to move like 1/8 of a turn.

This was all terribly difficult to photograph so please excuse the terrible pictures. I wanted to get the calipers balanced so I set them so the pads just touch the rotor when the jaw is open about 1/4" which is just under half the travel. In retrospect I'd probably go a little smaller, maybe 3/16 or about 1/3 of the travel.

With all that done pedal feel is MUCH improved and the parking brake finally works as it should.

The state of MA requires a yearly safety inspection. The parking brake was keeping me from getting it. Annoyingly these days they give you a sticker for the month your previous sticker expired so although I had it inspected in May I got an April sticker. Oh well...

The floor continues

 The difficulty with the great northern estate is really the distance from the great northern estate to, well, anywhere. That of course means I can't be around as much as I would like to and thus everything takes twice as long as I would like.

So, you'll remember a couple weeks ago when I started refinishing the floor in the camp. When I left the floor had been sanded to 80 grit and the first coat of finish put down.

I used an oil based finish with the old-school thinking that it would be a tougher coating for a floor that gets kind of tortured. The satin finish is supposed to not show imperfections so bad as gloss.

The result looked okay but felt terrible. I think that first coat raised the grain of the wood and made it feel really rough and unpleasant.

I'd used the entire gallon on the floor and couldn't locally source any more oil based finish, the stuff I could get was all water based and thus incompatible with what I had already put down.

Fast forward a couple weeks and I'm back with 2.5 gallons of the oil based finish, honestly this is the size can I should have bought in the first place. If I'd looked around a little more at Home Depot I'd have found it.

Because of the delay I needed to sand to 220 grit. I did that with my old Harbor Freight palm sander. This wouldn't have been so bad except that the backs of my knees were still sore from the 5 hour slog getting the floor flat. My knee pad straps had really dug in. I should have taken a few minutes to rig up my sander on a stick so I could do the job standing up. Oh well.

Once again I had to clean, clean, clean all the dust left behind and finally put down some of the new semi-gloss.

Semi-gloss gives a balance between that nice shiny look and hiding any imperfections in the job.

This is the dried 3rd coat just before I put down the 4th.

So with 4 coats down I'd intended to give a couple days for the floor to dry and harden but Independence day intervened and I didn't have a chance to get back to it. This is probably for the best, the longer it can harden without getting walked on much, the better. I'll be back at it soon.

While I was waiting for the floor to dry I took a minute to clean the accumulated cruft off of the pipe that goes under the dam. When I first walked out to the pipe a frog jumped. Later as I was cleaning he came back. Frogs are common around the edge of the pond but I rarely get to see them, they jump away before I get close. This guy hung out for 10 or more minutes just watching me. He was pretty big for a frog in our area, maybe just a bit smaller than my fist.

Well that was weird, again...

 You might remember back in 2023 when the burner element in our stove failed. I was sitting near it and heard the "BZZZT" of the element trying to weld itself to the body of the stove.

At the time I replaced that burner with one from eBay that cost about half of the official replacement. I noted that it was thinner than the original but otherwise seemed to work fine.

That was true until last September. I was up north hunting moose with my dad when Angie texted that it had happened again, only this time it was worse:

Where before the shielding had only melted a little bit Angie wasn't as quick to get the oven shut off and this time it melted but good.

I jumped on the internet but couldn't remember the model of the stove. I ended up ordering the same unit again. Interestingly this time the replacement is thicker.

I have a good feeling about this one, its better built than the last one. I probably ought to buy the proper replacement now, these are easy to change so just keep the right one around until this one fails. I probably won't do that but its what I ought to do...

Well heres a stupid thing

 Dad has a 2017 Jeep Renegade. During their last trip to Caribou the external thermometer quit and set to 128 degrees.

When that happens the car suddenly decides "You don't need any cabin heat" unless you use the defrost setting which is 100% heat all the time.

So I jump on the google machine and find that the exterior thermistor has failed. Chrysler says you need to replace the passenger side mirror, $350. Fortunately I found a YouTube video with a link to the part required. Its too bad that the video stinks because its got good information in it.

Anyway the hardest part of the job is disassembling the mirror:

I really shouldn't make fun of the video creator too much because I didn't get pictures of the clip locations either.

With the back of the mirror off there is a little like pimple down at the bottom of the mirror that houses the thermistor. Digging that out with a little screwdriver caused it to totally fall apart.

Putting the new thermistor on is easy although I did break off all the extra plastic to get 2 clean wires I could slide heat shrink tubing over so there wouldn't be a short. I then potted the new thermistor into the little pimple with some silicone sealant.

Totally fixed the problem and the new thermistors were like $10 for 60...

Unfortunately the failed thermistor sets a persistent check engine light. I own an OBD-II adapter for my phone but it was, of course, at home. I'd bought another one for dad but he's lost it...

When we're up in July I'll reset the check engine light but the good news is that it doesn't seem to hurt anything else...

A refinished floor

 Geez its been awhile. I keep thinking "gotta write the blog" and keep not doing it. Fortunately a bunch has happened.

Most recently I refinished the floor at camp:

This is a good before shot, you can see, down at the bottom the damage from 60 years of usage.

The floor is not actually "flooring". Its just 4" birch boards and family lore tells that those boards were green when the place was built.

I didn't realize (but should have) that those boards weren't flat and because they weren't flat I couldn't just quick sand them like I'd planned. I had to buy 40 grit belts and cross sand (sand against the grain) to flatten the floor. This took 5 HOURS on my knees with a belt sander.

The 60 and 80 grit passes took 1 hour each (16x24 room) although during that last pass my knee pad straps sawed 1 inch square chunks off the back of each knee... No picture, trust me, you don't want to see this one.

I bought a new "WEN" brand corded belt sander for the job and it was flawless. That first pass produced 5 gallons of sawdust.

After sanding to 80 grit I took my old Harbor Freight palm sander around the outside of the room, also at 80 grit. I bought that sander to refinish a hood to put on Hammie my '83 240D when I bought it the second time. That'd have been 2007ish. I've gotten good value for money on that.

Then swept the floor 3 times, vacuumed the floor 3 times and ran a tack cloth over it 3 times. Even with all that I still pulled up mouse turds on the roller while putting down the finish.

This is after one coat of oil based finish. Unfortunately I was unable to locally source additional oil based finish so additional coats will have to wait until July. Because of the wait I'll have to sand again to 220 grit. I'll do that with the palm sander, it shouldn't take all that long, just enough to scuff and provide adhesion.