Just completed chipping away at a caliper rebuild/conversion to O rings and had a few bugs that led to a funny ending.

Spent a great afternoon with Joe (champs65) who donated a caliper core to the cause since my lefty was not sleeved and was too rusty to rebuild. Well, it turns out that the donor caliper was a right hand.

The local Advance Auto had one in stock, albeit a lip seal type, which I got for $65.00 and gave them my rotten old one as a core. so far, so good.

I re-re-built the new one with the O rings, painted it, put it on the car and after some bleeding with the girlfriend in the driver's seat seemed good to go. After starting the car to go for a test drive and stepping on the brake, I hear a loud PFFFFT! sound and see a high pressure jet of mist shoot out of the left wheel well as the pedal goes to the floor.

I get her back in the car to step on the pedal while I'm looking out there and sure enough, there is the mist jet again coming from the O ring in between the casting halves. Upon disassembly, I see an air bubble in the casting right along side the O ring recess and a segment of the O ring blown away...great.

It occured to me that I might be lucky enough to use part of the right handed caliper I got from Joe, and fortunately the outer or non handed half had the casting defect, so I painted that part up, honed it and put the O ring pistons in that half and put it all back together...bled AGAIN, got a nice pedal and thought this ordeal was finally over.

I pulled back in from the test drive to see two 6" diameter puddles right under where you'd connect the rubber lines to the hard line on the frame. Jacked her up again to inspect and everything was as clean as a whistle and dry as a bone.

I put the car back on the ramps and decided to look at it another day and to see if it leaked again. It didn't, which I thought was strange, but no leak is better than a leak that you can't find.

Last night I thought I'd have another close look, so I took the %*/?ing tires off again, saw nothing but clean, dry parts and decided that it was a fluke and not to worry about it any more.

After cleaning up for the night, I noticed 2 fresh puddles about 2" in diameter right in the center of the old ones and stood there in disbelief.

I don't know why it occurred to me to look at my floor jack, but it's cylinder was leaking and there was a spot on the garage floor where it had been parked the night before.

I was able to cobble up a complete right hand caliper from the huge pile of parts on the bench, re-painted it and returned that Franken-caliper to Advance for a refund.

 

You returned your old busted caliper as a new one for a refund for someone else to buy? Maybe that's just how it reads....

 

Uh...no, that's just how YOU read it.

I returned a caliper with THE SAME defective casting that caused the failure, and would have for someone else. I had to provide a reason for the return.

The only thing different about it was that it had a right handed inner casting, which I told them about...they didn't care as it was going to be returned to the re-builder anyway at which point it would have been re-built again (without the bad outer casting) and re-packaged as a right hand unit.

Good to see the focus placed on such an insignificant detail as well as the immediate assumption that I was screwing some future consumer.

 

IME you can put ANY caliper in the core return box and big parts stores don't care, as long as something is in there

 

Well yes for a core you can and nobody cares. It just read like you returned a newly painted frankencaliper for a full refund. I used to work at a parts store and you would be blown away by what people try. I didn't assume anything, I read your last paragraph as written.

 

When do we get to the funny part?

 

The funny part is the girlfriend getting blamed for pushing too hard on the brake and busting up the caliper o rings. Should have told her not to hold onto the steering wheel while pushing down the brake pedal as that busts up the o rings causing them to leak........

 

She's so short that even with the seat all the way forward, she had trouble getting the pedal all the way down during the bleed.

It was also the first time she's ever sat in the driver's seat after a few years of asking "when can I drive this thing?"

This from someone who thinks the oil light means it's time to change the oil. :O

 

Huh, learned something new today. Something that I probably realized and never thought twice about

This is where I got the casting number info from:
http://www.fixvetteparts.com/page2.html
Just shows a 795 and 796 casting as being "front inner and outer"

So I'm guessing that when the halves are separated, they are interchangeable from side to side when the bleeder hole and brake hose hole is tapped out for L or R use...right?

Glad it worked out for ya in the end though Charlie!

 

It did and I thank you again Joe.