Cars and Common Sense

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Two quick stories.
A cow-orker asked me why her heater wasn’t working (03 or 04 Impala). I asked her if it was blowing and she told me that it is blowing, but it’s cold air. Okay, “Is your engine running hot, or cold?” “Yea, but I don’t trust the gauge”* I told her she should check the coolant…wait for it…“I just filled it yesterday.”
Wow, I almost fell over when she said that. I told her she should have her husband look at it later (I know he knows about cars)

*There’s a recall on her car that effects the little LCD panel, so she thinks that might be triggering the engine temp warnings. Under normal circumstances maybe, but when you can’t get the heat going in the cab and you adding coolant, you may want to pay attention to those.

Second. Another cow-orker asked if I could change her brakes today. No problem, bring the car to work, I’ll do it in the parking lot, I have all the tools here. She brings it in. I asked if it was grinding, she said it USED to grind, but it doesn’t anymore. :confused: Okay, never seen that happen, but we’ll take a look. I pulled off the tire, and couldn’t believe my eyes. I pulled my dad over (who’s worked on cars as a shadetree mechanic all his life). Neither of us have ever seen brakes in such bad shape. I left for the auto store and my dad walked over to her (she was in the sotre working at this point) and told her that he would drive her home after work if I didn’t get it finished today. Honestly, she shouldn’t have even driven it too work. So what’s the problem? What makes your brakes grind and then stop. Well, the pads had worn down all the way, and at this point what was left of the pad (not the part that supposed to rub, the metal that it’s rivited too) was about a quarter of an inch thick, I could break it in half without much effort since what was left was pretty rusted. The rotor was actually crumbling it was so thin. So that explains the grinding, now why did the grinding stop, and why did I say the car wasn’t even safe to drive. Well the rotor had actually broken into two pieces. The ‘hub’ was still bolted to the axle and the ‘disk’ was just kinda hanging there. So when she hit the brakes the caliper clamped down onto a disc that wasn’t attached to anything. Og knows how long her car was relying just on the rear drums. Oddly though, her other front brake was nearly as bad. It does look like a brake that’s been squeeling and then grinding for a while, but at least it appears to have SOME breaking power, at least the rotor was still intact. (BTW before I leave work in a few minutes I will be telling her that the next time she has her car looked at for any reason she should have the drums in the back checked out, I don’t know how long she was depeding on just those). Moral of the story. When you brakes squeel start thinking about replacing them, when the grind, get it done NOW, if they stop grinding and your breaking power goes to crap, you better find someone to drive you to work.

2

Weird timing. I was getting ready for work this morning when I heard a car crash right outside of my house. I ran out to make sure every one was okay. The lady had hit a school bus with her Cherokee.

She was shaken up, but seemed fine. I went over to the Cherokee to survey the damage. This was maybe 2-3 minutes after the accident. It was obviously still running.

“Um… is your car still running?” I asked, thinking to myself that turning it off would have been the first thing I did before even getting out of the car.
“Yes. It’s still running just fine.” she replied.
“No, no it’s not,” I said. “It’s leaking coolant all over the ground.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you need a new radiator. And it means if you don’t turn it off, it’ll overheat and you could possibly destroy your engine.”
“Oh… so I should turn it off then?”
“Uh… yes. Quickly. And don’t drive it home.”

Silly lady drivers.

3

If there is any sense to this, it certainly isn’t common. I have no idea what you’re getting at.

4

wasson, have a care! The problem isn’t womanhood. You really don’t want the ladies of the Dope * REALLY* mad at you, now, do you? :rolleyes: Have you ever had an accident? Did you leave your wallet in the car? Or leave the door open? or the engine running? It happens all the time. Th first responders find things like that all the time. At least she didn’t step into on coming traffic and die. That happens too. She was shaken by the accident. Her responses didn’t show a great knowledge of the working of the internal combustion engine, but that’s all.

Joey P Indeed. My brother put off doing his brakes and they failed on a rainy mountain road. The truck rolled several times.

In this quote, did you mean the other front brake wasn’t as bad? That’s rather strange. Had the car been wrecked at some point?
With the other problem, was the gage she was questioning indicating it was overheating, but she was getting cold air from the vents? Does the comfort control (heating/cooling) come directly off the engine cooling system? Sounds like a leak in the reserve coolant, or a tiny one that only leaks when it comes to pressure.

5

If you have no coolant in your car there won’t be any to circulate to the heater core to provide hot air to the cabin. Also, IME the temp gauge will read either very cold (no coolant to go past the temp sending unit) or very hot (I can only assume that either a burst of REALLY hot air makes it past the unit or the pump manages to muster up enough liquid (which is now very hot) to acutally pump it up and it past the temp sending unit, I really don’t quite understand it I just know from my own expierince that when my radiator ran dry or low the gauge would go back and forth). Either way if your temp guage is telling you something (anything) is wrong with the temp, AND you just added coolant (I later found out her hubby added the coolant and mentioned that he thinks she may have blown the head gasket) something is probably wrong, even if you don’t know that the heater is linked to the cooling system. I guess that wasn’t really part of the common sense part of the post, but I dealt with it less the 24 hours previous to the brake thing so I gouped them together. I often forget that I’ve been tinkering around with cars long enough that things that are common sense to me arn’t always common sense to others.

picunurse If the car has been wrecked ever, I don’t know. It’s a 1991 Buick Century and she’s only 18, she’s had the car as long as I’ve known her, but I don’t know anything about it. Let me clarify what I meant by other front pad. I dismantled the passenger side first. This is the side (let’s call it set: two pads and a rotor) that was REALLY bad. Brakes wore past the ‘pads’ and so far into the metal it’s mounted on, that I could break them apart by hand. The rotor on this side was thin enough that it was literally crumbling, I found pieces of it lodged in the caliper, and like I mentioned before, the ‘disk’ part of the rotor had separted from the ‘hub’ part so the brake was doing NOTHING at all. If you’ve ever gone to an auto parts store and seen a rotor up on display to show how bad they get (“Don’t let this happen to you” type of thing) this was much worse. Anyways, as for the driver side ‘set’ I don’t remember compleatly (it was going to rain soon, so I just wanted to get it done) but I think it looked like it was just about to start grinding. The really bad side, I had a hard time pulling the screws out (the one’s that hold the caliper to the axle) so perhaps the brakes on that side had become so stiff that after putting her foot on the brake the pressure would remain on the pad afterwords and that’s they the were so bad. So to make a long paragraph short. Each ‘set’ was worn evenly (inside vs outside) but the sets themselves were uneven. Figure each pad on the driver side had about 1mm of pad left, and each pad on the passenger side had **-**5mm left.

wassonSimilar story, I had (well still have it, but don’t use it for general driving anymore) a '91 Ford Brono. It had a habit of running well for a while but would periodically decide it would rather not have any coolant and purge it all out thorugh a very small crack in the radiator that even pressure testing couldn’t find. Anyways I went to school one day and noticed it was running hot. Before I left school I checked the radiator and sure enough there was no coolant. I got in started it up and started driving (I had taken it on much longer drives without coolant and knew it would be okay on this drive (I know I know common sense, but I didn’t know it was out of coolant on the longer drive as I had some screwy gauges at the time, but that’s another thread) since I didn’t want to waste time getting home, I was driving slightly fast, a stop light up ahead turned yellow, the car in front of me was going thorugh it so I was going thorugh it right behind him. He changed his mind and slammed on his breaks and I couldn’t stop fast enough and rear ended him (did I mention I had a plow rack on the front of the Bronco). Anyways knowing I was having problems with the coolant I shut off the engine and called the cops, before I even dialed one showed up (I later figured out that he changed his mind about going through the light because he saw the cop). The cop saw it happen so he wanted us to get our vehichles out of the intersection, naturally since I’m already having engine problems, I’m in an intersection, and it’s raining, the bronco decided not to start. I eventually got it started, moved it, and shut it back down. “Why’d you turn it off” the cop asked, “I was at school and I lost all my coolant, so I don’t want it to overheat.” To which he yelled back at me “THEN WHY ARE YOU DRIVING IT!!!” I raised my voice just slightly and said "I can’t work on it at school, but I can fix it if I get it back home. Oddly he just backed off and said “oh”

hmmm, there was a point in there somewhere. BTW before I get yelled at for driving with no coolant, I do know the limitations of this vehichle, so I knew I’d be okay.
Okay, feel free to skip this last part as it’s just a followup to brake girl. After I got the keys from her, I went back to ask her some questions about the car (year, make, model…) and I noticed she was crying. I asked someone else why she was crying and they said that she’s been asking her step dad to do this for three months, and he still hadn’t done it, but she only had to ask me once. I wonder who paid for her tires, they look like that have about 10,000 miles on them and I’m willing to bet her brakes started squeeling before the tires were changed. She also started crying every time me or my father tried to explain to her that her car wasn’t safe to drive. But I’ll get around to that little lecture another time.

6

Here’s about the best picture I could find. really the only differnce is that the rotor still had a layer of metal on the top (and an equally thin one on the back) but it was think in enough that it would have looked like the one in the picture if I had dropped it, or hit it with a hammer a few times.

7

Oh. My. God.

From that picture, it looks like one “side” of the rotor is gone compeletely, and those are the spacers that hold one side away from the other, yes?

If so, she’s lucky that when hitting the brakes, it didn’t completely lock the tire!

You’re a nice guy Joey, we need more of us out there.

-Butler

8

Nope, I’ve never been in an accident. That’s because I’m not a lady driver.

9

On her rotor you could see the spacers showing through, but there was still metal (albeit VERY VERY thin and brittle) covering most of the rotor, and it was equally bad on the other side of the rotor. Her brakes COULDN’T lock, which was the problem. As you can see from the picture the inner and outer part of that disc have separated. On a normal brake, the caliper and pads clamp down on the outer part of the disk (where you see the spacers) and that would slow down the inner part of the disk where it is attached to the axle via the lugs. But as you can see in that pic they have come apart. So when she hit the brakes, they clamped down on what was left of the outer part of the disc (which probably wasn’t spinning much to begin with) and the inner part wasn’t really effected at all. So basically, the rotor did lock when she hit the brakes, but it didn’t really make a difference. Other then not rear ending anyone, the other reason she was lucky is that the disc (since it was ‘free wheeling’ so to speak and not really attached to anything and so thin, it was starting to cut through her caliper. When I saw it, it wasn’t much more then a scratch (maybe .5mm deep) and it would have taken a long time to do any real damage, but still, not good.

10

I worked in a brake and muffler shop years ago and we would get something like that about once a week. And they were usually the biggest complainers about the cost to fix their brakes.