Vroom…squeak!by Angie
12 Dec 2007
11:12 pm2
Cars can be so exasperating. We think our brakes need replacing pretty soon here and are trying to decide when and how to make it happen. Jim and his friend Justin were looking them over this evening and it looks like they’ve got another couple of months on them. With Justin’s help, Jim is thinking of replacing the brakes as a DIY project (it would save us hundreds of dollars – literally) …but just contemplating such a task made us both even more aware of how little we know about cars.
Justin has done home repairs before and worked on cars a lot with his dad when he was younger, but he doesn’t feel like an expert, either. He said it seems like those who know tons about cars remind him of a club – if you’re not “in the know” early on, it’s really hard to be initiated later in life. Where does a car-dumb grown-up with no mechanical savvy or spare car to take apart find herself some effective tools for figuring out how cars work, anyway?
The end.
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11:18 PM on December 12th, 2007
jim told me to end my post like that. 🙂
11:21 AM on December 13th, 2007
I worked on cars a lot with my dad when I was younger, and still do. I was home for less than four hours last September and my father and I had already visited a junk yard and done a rear brake job on my brother’s car. That’s just life per usual at that house.
I recently did a timing belt and water pump on my wife’s car in my garage here in Texas. Car repair is 80-90% guts to take things apart and get dirty and 10% research and manuals. If you have a good manual and can talk to someone on google groups, or a car specific forum you are set. So for instance there are forums out there for people with your car and they usually have FAQ’s for common repairs, or at least repairs that aren’t that straight forward. But it’s a great place to start. If you do your homework through the research you just need the guts to just do it.
Also plan on it taking a lot of time. Don’t tell yourself you will have it done by 5, the moment you do, it will be done by five the next day. Just work until it’s finished. And if it takes an extra day, so be it.
P.S. if they are disk brakes, it’s straight forward job that you should be able tohandle with minimal tools. Disk brakes are not as intuitive, but disk are simple and I could walk you through it over the phone probably.
P.P.S. Some disk brakes just squeak on occasion and you can get silencer from the Auto Parts store, also some are thicker than others. You can look at the new ones at the auto parts store and judge if yours are really that bad. Unfortunately this gets muddied with different brand brakes making different thicknesses for the same car. SO maybe this isn’t as helpful as it could be.