So I’ve been changing my own brake pads for a while now. \u00a0It’s a very easy job, take off the tire, undo 2 bolts that hold the brake caliper on and then take the caliper off. \u00a0The old pads then slide out. \u00a0After that you use a ‘C’ clamp to press the piston back in and then\u00a0and the new pads slide right in and the whole caliper slides back onto the roter and you put the 2 bolts in and replace the tire. \u00a0Voila it’s done. \u00a0Not even 10 minutes if I have help 20 if I don’t. \u00a0<\/p>\n
My dad asked me to help him do the brakes on his Mini. \u00a0Sure, they’re not that bad, \u00a0I figured with help we’d have it done in 30 minutes. \u00a0Heck with the mini you don’t even need \u00a0a jack, he could lift up one side and I’d put a jack stand under it. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Apparently disk brakes on European vehicles work differently than those on American and Asian made cars. \u00a0After an hour trying to take the caliper off I finally decided that since the pads were going into the garbage I’d destroy them and use a hammer to take it off. \u00a0That worked, now to compress the piston. \u00a0After going next door to borrow a clamp big enough we tried and tried and it didn’t compress. \u00a0After playing for a while we discovered that if we activated the emergency brake the piston would come all the way out. We took the boot off and the piston twisted off. \u00a0The piston screws on, that explains why we couldn’t push it back into place. \u00a0At this point we have the brake caliper completely disconnected. \u00a0With the help of a pair of needle nosed pliers we got it twisted back into place. \u00a0After we completely reconnected it we went to do the other side. \u00a0We couldn’t get that caliper twisted back into place until we disconnected the brake lines and drained the fluid out. \u00a0Still the second brake only took about 15 minutes, well 20 after we found the small leak at the connection of the brake line and got that fixed. \u00a0After bleeding the brake lines we logged more than 5 hours for a 30 minute brake job. \u00a0Apparently all we needed was a brake caliper rewind kit<\/a>\u00a0and it would have taken the 10 minutes per brake. \u00a0I guess since one of the brakes was to the metal and we’ll have to replace that rotor before long we’ll have to get that set and save ourselves 4.5 hours. \u00a0<\/p>\n I learned a lot. \u00a0I still don’t understand why BMW charges $1,000 for a brake job. \u00a0We could replace all the pads and rotors for less than $300. \u00a0If they really make $1,400 per hour I need to be a BMW mechanic. \u00a0Maybe I should open up my own shop and charge $1,000 dollars per hour. \u00a0Heck even $100 per hour would be nice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So I’ve been changing my own brake pads for a while now. \u00a0It’s a very easy job, take off the tire, undo 2 bolts that hold the brake caliper on and then take the caliper off. \u00a0The old pads then slide out. \u00a0After that you use a ‘C’ clamp to press the piston back in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":189,"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amosfamily.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}