Ness' Outpost

Kevin and I got all geared up to change the front pads and rotors on my Cavalier this weekend. Since I was jacking the car up and I was close to my 135K oil change we did that as well.

Things went really well for a bunch of novices. Labour took probably 4 times as long as a brake shop, but it’s fun to get in there with a wrench and have a go. We’ll only get better. The big problem of the day was when we were missing the 3/4″ hex socket to get the caliper pins off so a quick trip to Canadian Tire was in order.

What wasn’t very good to see was that my pads wearing unevenly. Which means the caliper pins were seized – they were pretty hard to turn through the bushings but they moved. I cleaned and lubed them up and along with the bushings in the caliper itself and hopefully these new ceramic pads will wear better.

I decided to replace the rotors instead of machining the OEM ones again. They’ve been machined 3 times now and warp every pad change (40-50K km). But I think they warped even more this time because of the uneven pad pressure, just the piston was pushing outward on the rotor with a single pad instead of both pads grabbing the rotor.

The next front brake job I’ll have to replace the calipers since it’s about the same cost as rebuilding them on the Cavalier.

But up next in the home mechanic maintenance is trying to figure out the rear shoes and drums, then doing a brake fluid flush.

Jay put me onto this website called monoprice.com for all my cabling needs. With a new home theatre system I can upgrade my Wii’s output cable to the Enhanced Definition which will give me 480p instead of 480i (which is the standard cable) on my LCD HDTV.

I also have signed up for a free trial on Zip.ca which sends me DVD’s and bluray discs that I have on an online list when they are available. The problem is that I got a BSG season 3 disc 1 DVD that wouldn’t play properly in my Samsung BD-P1500 blu-ray player. I don’t know what was going on, so I returned the disc as damaged – wouldn’t play. I upgraded the firmware on the player through the USB port and when a new disc arrived (that looked like it had the same watermarked damage as the original disc) it still wouldn’t play. It wasn’t until I put it in my laptop and it played that I started to suspect the up converting blu-ray player.

It’s not a big deal, I can watch the older format DVD on my laptop, but Lauren likes BSG too so I’d prefer it to be on the big screen. Our new TV has a VGA connection that laptops can hook into all I needed was a cable.

To make the long story short, I got a 15′ SVGA cable with audio plugs for $6USD and the Wii cable for $3. Shipping was more than the cables at $10. The cables run here at tigerdirect for about $30 each so I’m saving money and I don’t have to go to the store to pick it up. If you need cables, check out monoprice.com before you go forking over too much money to a big box store.