Yes, it’s ‘name that thing’: I think it’s a car part but maybe not. It’s a rusted metal ring about 1’ in diameter, with an edge that looks like it was wearing against something.
I found it on the driveway this morning, where my parent’s 1998 Ford Windstar was parked the night before. My Dad swears it couldn’t have come off the van, but given his mechanical history, I’m still undecided.
Given the state it’s in, it looks like whatever function it used to perform has gone unfulfilled for quite some time, so it’s clearly not something essential, but still - anyone care to guess what it is?
It’s something of a stab in the dark, but I’d say there’s an outside chance this is a piece from a badly deteriorated disk brake rotor. It might be worth checking the condition of these.
It looks as like something that has accumulated until it got big enough to fall off. If that doesn’t make sense, it reminded me of the “build-up” of metal shavings on the chop-saw at work where we cut angle iron.
You can get buildup that looks like that inside drum brakes; a crumbly amalgum of brakeshoe dust and corroded metal shavings from the drum. I’m not sure how it’d work itself out of the brake system though. The size is right too.
I hope that CD doesn’t have your tax returns on it or somtin :smack:
It’s rusted metal, and it was just laying there???
I agree about the rotor idea, but if it was off the Windstar, you’d know. Fast, fast as in can’t stop.
Very odd.
Looks like it could be whats left of the cover to a meter pit. But the location found and the darker color around the edges doesn’t really support that.
Ya know, this would be a very good (or very very bad) April fools joke. Save up some old rusty nuts and bolts, a few old hard to identify parts… Once a week or so…
Well, FatBaldGuy gets partial credit for identifying the 1995 BSD install disk #2 I found in the garage. (And thanks to enipla, I’ll now be saving random junk I see in the gutter. >:-) )
I’d checked the rotors before, and they looked fine. I think hermann and Squink have the right idea - metal dust from rotors/drums could build up as rusty crud until thermal stress or something made it fall off.
Oh hey! The Ford uses sealed drum brakes on the rear, and the front rotors don’t match the debris at all. But after seeing that the rotors were rusty, but not that rusty, I just checked the '94 Grand Prix that occasionally sees use. The front rotors didn’t look right, but when I checked the picture I snapped under the rear, I got this. That stuff adhering to the rear rotor (just down and left of the middle) matches the ‘ring’ almost perfectly, and you can even see that at least half of it got chipped off.
I’d say that due to lack of impingment from the brake pad, the center of the rotor builds up rust and metal dust in a ring shape. For some reason, a lot of it broke off and thus looked like a car part.
Well thanks everyone, that’s cool. You helped me figure it out in less than 6 hours, and (apparently due to the multimedia style of my OP) broke both my personal records for thread views and replies. So long as nobody decides to take this route in the medical advice threads, I’m a happy guy.
