Sunday, October 31, 2010

Graf #10

My wife looks up from her coffee and announces to me that she hears a grinding noise when she pushes the brakes in her car. I go out and look and sure enough I see the rotors are all gouged and she has obviously ignored the squeaking the brakes were making for quite some time. Now I will be the first to admit that I am not a mechanic. I know what most of the parts are but not how to replace them. This time it was a little different. Money was tight and after calling a couple of garages we were resigned to the fact this was going to cost us four or five hundred dollars. That's when I came to me. I will learn how to do brakes. I went to the local automotive store and purchased a set of rotors, a set of brake pads, and a Chilton's manual for her car model. It was easy to get the components apart but when it came to getting them back together the book left some gaps. I placed a phone call to a friend who is a mechanic and he was able to talk me through some of the voids. I got the job done and it took three or four times longer that if we had taken it to a garage but it cost less that a hundred bucks. Now I do the brakes on both our cars.

1 comment:

  1. Real life research for sure--I'm surprised the Chilton's left you up in the air, but it is always nice to be sure about the brakes!

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