Furious About Fit
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Ideas come from just about anywhere. Thomas Edison supposedly had so many in dreams that he’d sleep in a chair holding a spoon over a tin plate. Dropping the spoon onto the plate would wake him up so he could write down the new idea while it was still fresh in his mind.
Writing it down while it’s fresh is what I’m doing right now, having just done the brakes on my long suffering Honda Civic. What I encountered made me furious. Problem one was Honda’s odd front hub design that guarantees about two hours of work “re-and-re-ing” the entire corner of the car to replace a broken wheel stud. I ended up changing the wheel bearing assembly, purely out of absolute frustration over the job and a desire to never deal with that hub again.
But the second issue was the back breaker. The remanufactured calipers, from a major remanufacturer well known in the trade, were a mess. The units themselves were O.K., but the hardware included in the boxes looked like it was inspected by drug addicts. The right caliper included a slider that was incorrect for the application, but close enough to be bolted on, a surefire safety issue for DIYers; and the left included a torn, incorrect boot.
What do you do in a situation like this? For the slider, I removed the old one and gently clamped it in the bench vise (soft jaws, of course), then cleaned it up with the back of a strip of emery cloth and a dab of valve grinding compound. I then checked it for straightness by rolling it across a piece of glass. Fortunately, it cleaned up without pits or ridges and was straight. On the other side, the bad boot required digging into my box of rubber bits that I’d saved over the years until I found a replacement in good condition.
Did I end up with good brakes? Sure, but it took time — time that I’d never excuse in a busy shop environment and on a customer’s car; and more importantly, it shook my confidence in the brand. I’ve had similar issues with other brands, especially with CV joints and axle assemblies, and learned my lesson years ago about “White Box” parts. But I’m starting to wonder what’s in some name-brand products as well. Are some brake remanufacturers buying the hardware kits offshore?
In case you’re wondering which brand made the bad caliper assemblies I’m talking about, I’m not going to say, at least not yet. My procedure for dealing with bad parts is simple: send them back to the jobber that sold them, and e-mail the manufacturer. Why the second step? Because the jobber won’t deal with the manufacturer or W/D unless the return rate on a specific part is astronomical. The trouble is lousy techs routinely return good parts, so jobbers have become skeptical about returns due to quality issues. Manufacturers, however, pay attention to professional technicians, especially if they bring up specific issues. My problems were clearly inspection-related: missing and incorrect hardware. The calipers were fine, but why would I buy an alternator from this company and risk toasting an ECU? This might be an isolated incident and I haven’t contacted the company yet. I’ll be sniffing around to see if techs have had similar experiences, and if there’s a pattern here, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, don’t settle for bad parts, name brand or not.
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