I was driving home yesterday evening. There was a bit of a slow-down on the highway. Stepping on the brake provided me with my first indication that my brake master cylinder needed to be replaced.
Instead of going home, I drove straight to the mechanic, where they will find the car Monday morning. I managed to get there without the brake pedal actually hitting the floorboard, but it came close a couple of times. I suspect it may be 2 or 3 days before they have a chance to get around to it, but I’m not driving that car until it’s fixed.
It seems like there’s something of a trend in the automotive world for things to fail suddenly and unexpectedly now. Batteries, for example, used to give warning that they were failing–not so much these days. And when the brake master cylinder on my '75 Chevy went bad, it failed gracefully: I had plenty of time to do something about it before the problem got severe. Not this time. Things went from “no apparent problem” to “big problem” with nothing in-between.
So, if you are looking for excitement in your life, that’s a sure-fire way of getting some.
Maybe the master cylinder. If there is a brake fluid leak, it might be somewhere else in the braking system away from the master cylinder. I’m glad you were able to park without collision.
I’ve experienced the opposite, cars in the old days died unexpectedly or failed to start at all while cars now normally still will go with some reduced functionality/ or hard to start but will start.
As for batteries, they do indicate they are week, but yes if you ignore that expect it to be totally flat and not accepting any charge suddenly.
Did your wife happen to mention anything about your life insurance being paid up?
IDK if this works the same way, but my wife was having trouble with shifting gears and it turned out to be the cable from the pedal to the whatsis–it stretched too far to engage (disengage?) the clutch. An easy fix. Hope yours is as futz-free.
OTOH, you may get extra life out of them. So your battery, brakes etc lasted 5 years and then began to fade for a year before becoming unusable. Sometime during that year, you’d get them repaired. The flip side being that with better materials and manufacturing, maybe they’re lasting 7-10 years and working perfectly right up to the moment they cease to function.
However, I suspect confirmation bias.
Also, it seems whatever is going on with your brakes, currently, failed just fine as well. You were able to safely drive it to the mechanic. It’s not that you came up to a red light while a group of nuns were passing and you had zero braking ability.
In any case, it entirely depends on the exact issue. Bad o-rings in the master cylinder will cause the pedal to feel funny and slowly move to the floor as you’re pushing on it. If you lose enough fluid, you’ll have no brakes at all. This would be the case regardless of when the car was built.
As my dad would say “that’s what snowbanks are for”. For context, this was in an old snow plow with horrendous brakes, that was only used on our property.
Driving through the Continental Divide en route to Casper, Wyoming (solar eclipse, doncha know), we discovered our car had something called a “brake booster.”
About 25 years ago or so, I was living in Vegas and a friend came to visit. I lent him my 1965 Ford F250 to drive around.
I get a call at work. Its him.
*“Brakes failed on the truck. In a little trouble.” *
I go hauling ass down to where he is. Where the truck was, was planted firmly in the well manicured front garden of a very well known and famous casino/hotel on The Strip. :eek: A garden so lovely, people make it a tourist stop all on its own.
A bunch of security buzzing around, people gawking. I do a quick check on the systems, discover the hose to one rear wheels had broken. I put a pair of Vice-Grips on the hose, pinching it off, dump in some fluid (Be Prepared, Kids!) and got the hell out of there before The World Of Shit came down on us.
Funny thing, though, was the handle to the parking brake was pulled out and sitting on the dash (it has never been hooked up since I’ve owned the truck). My friend told me the story of what had happened and how he grabbed the handle and it simply pulled right out. I got the beautiful mental image of that happening, just like you would expect to see in a cartoon. Well, it was hit a taxi, or take a trip through the garden.
Well, it was hit a taxi, or take a trip through the garden.