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2000 Nissan Sentra Front Brake Job

Sunday, 18 October 2009 05:07 administrator Timestream Exploration - tonekids

Well, I followed Doktorbrown's lead and decided that the front brakes in the Sentra required replacement. In fact, they had been quite overdue.

I decided to order a pair of "fully loaded" calipers, which mean calipers plus mounting bracket plus pre-installed pads/retainer clips/etc.

So the day finally arrives, and I get the front end up on jackstands.

Loosen lug nuts
Use floor jack on frame rails just aft of jackstand points, one side at a time
Remove lug nuts and wheels.

What I found underneath wasn't great. Daddy says it's not the worst he's seen, but they still desperately needed replacement. I've only taken pictures of the driver's side, but the passenger side was worse. I'm not sure what caused this unusual scoring pattern, but I'm betting it has something to do with the poor braking and vibration I was having.

I'm not sure what I was braking on, but it wasn't brake pad material. These were from the passenger side, and I think that's where the vibration was coming from, once they warmed up on the highway.

Studying really pays off. The Haynes manual has lots of good pictures and procedures, but I didn't know if that would help me much once I started working on the real thing. Well, it really did! Once I was looking at a real life disc brake, it all made sense and I felt more confident.

I took a picture from inside the wheelwell looking out, to capture what stuff looked like in case I had some problems. The right side of this picture is front, i.e. this is the driver's side caliper. You can see the boot for the CV joint on the left side of the picture.

This next picture jumps forward quite a bit. It's hard to take pictures when you're wearing filthy nitrile gloves coated in grime and brake fluid. I removed the old caliper, piece by piece, but I bought new fully loaded calipers so I could have just taken off the caliper mounting bracket bolts and removed the caliper in one piece. For this exercise, I wanted to learn how to remove the caliper, then the pads, for future work.

If you've worked with cars, you would probably be smart enough to break all of the bolts on an assembly loose before trying to remove them one by one. In my excitement, I removed one caliper bracket bolt, then tried the other one. Well, it was so rusted on there, the entire bracket rotated. I realized that I should have just loosened the first one instead of removing it. So, I rotated the bracket back in position and then reinserted the top bracket bolt and went back to wrenching on the bottom one. Shortly after doing that, I sheared off the bottom bolt. I don't know if the bolt snapped due to my improper procedure or whether it would have snapped off anyway.

This was the low point of the day. I went inside to inform Heather that I had broken a critical bolt for which I did not have a replacement. She gave me a wary look, but a trusting one. I can always count on Heather to have the faith that I will succeed in what I am doing. Hell, she was filling brake fluid reservoirs before I even had a car of my own! Heather also gave me some car tips, like the one to put the wheels under the car when you jack it up, so in case the jackstands fail the car will fall on the wheels and not completely crush your body. Also, my friend and colleague Fred Ballard said to "never start a project while the hardware store is closed." I followed his advice in this case, but instead of the hardware store it was Ace, AutoZone, and Bill Kay Nissan :-)

The next step was to call Bill Kay Nissan in Downers Grove, and pray that they had replacement bolts.

The guy on the line goes "parts."

I say, "Got a 2000 Nissan Sentra, need bolts for the front disc brake caliper mounting bracket."

He says, "oooh...probably gotta order those..." (my heart sinks)

clickclickclickclikc..."hey, looks like I have four left"...(exactly the right amount)

I say, "PLEASE PUT THEM ASIDE. I'LL BE RIGHT OVER!"

All that was left to do on the driver's side was to remove the rotor (go ahead and whack it really hard with an engineer's hammer or a dead-blow hammer, if you've got one.

So, the final reconciliation:

Approximately what our local awesome repair shop would have charged: ~$500-$550

My costs:
2x new rotors: $60
Fully loaded caliper pair: $100
Tools I didn't have: $38
4x new Grade 9 bolts: $12
Brake fluid/cleaner/chemicals: $20
My price: $230

Intangible costs:
7 hrs. labor (trips to various vendors included)
2 trips to Ace
1 trip to Bill Kay Nissan
Dicking around with three trips to AutoZone because the first pair of calipers were broken
Non-recurring engineering cost to learn about this stuff and work up the courage to do it

It is clear to me, that if I didn't have a Saturday to burn, that taking it to Roger over at Automotive Service in Downers Grove, and having it back same day or next day would be a no-brainer, and there would be no shame in splashing out some cash for not having to do it yourself.

Last Updated on Sunday, 18 October 2009 20:04

How to Build a Hackintosh with Snow Leopard, Start to Finish

Thursday, 01 October 2009 14:40 doktorbrown Timestream Exploration - Experiments

By Adam Pash, 9:00 AM on Thu Sep 3 2009,

Two years ago, I detailed how to build a Hackintosh for under $800—then covered how to do the same with less hacking. Now that Snow Leopard's out, we're revisiting the Hackintosh, building a Hack Pro from scratch for roughly $900.

Update: This guide has been superceded by a much easier method: Install Snow Leopard on Your Hackintosh PC, No Hacking Required.

For folks eager to try a Mac but never wanted to plunk down the high price tag to get it, the Hackintosh—that is, a regular PC tweaked to run OS X—has always been an attractive option. That said, it's not something you should take on lightly unless you're willing—even enthusiastic—to build and maintain a PC entirely from scratch. I can't guarantee it'll be easy, but if you follow this guide step-for-step (it's exhaustive) and stick with the same (or at least roughly the same) hardware as I am, I can vouch for a rock solid system that also happens to cost a good deal less than you'd pay for a comparable Mac. (More at lifehacker)

(tonekids.com ed. responds: This may become one of our many projects in the near future as the G3 iBook DV, G3 Desktop upgraded with G4- affectionately known as the G 3.5, and the G4 PowerBook are seeming older and slower everyday...)

In Age of High-Tech, Are Americans Losing Touch with DIY Skills

Sunday, 20 September 2009 01:30 doktorbrown Timestream Exploration - Failure

In Age of High-Tech, Are Americans Losing Touch with DIY Skills?

Read a call to action for bringing back our handymen, then debate PM's list of 25 skills every man should know!

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Illustration by Paul Blow
Photograph by Burcu Avsar

Published in the October 2007 issue.

Page 1 2 Next »

Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program acomputer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

That’s a tall order. Although I can only do some of those things, I approve of the principle. Now adays, though, we’re specializing more. A popular Internet essay is titled: “I Can’t Do One-Quarter of the Things My Father Can.” Are hands-on skills—building things, fixing things, operating machines and so on—really in decline?

I think so. SAT scores provide a record of academic performance, but there’s no equivalent archive for tracking handiness. There is, however, a lot of anecdotal evidence that what used to be taken for granted as ordinary mechanical skills now amounts to something unusual. When I recently wrote on my Web site about the importance of giving kids hands-on toys, a reader e-mailed: “Boy, can I second [your point about] the lack of basic skills in adults. I volunteer with Habitat for Humanity here in Los Angeles. The volunteers who come out frequently can’t do something as basic as using a tape measure. ... Many of my Saturdays are effectively clinics on how to pound a nail.”

Even the simplest of automotive tasks, changing a tire, seems to be beyond the ken of many people. According to AAA, nearly 4 million motorists requested roadside assistance last year—for flat tires.

And just look at the Popular Mechanics Boy Mechanic books to see the kinds of skills that boys and teenagers were once routinely expected to possess. These books (which PM published in the early 20th century and recently reissued) assumed that young readers would be prepared to construct a fully rigged ice boat, a toy steam engine, or—I’m not kidding—a homebuilt “Bearcat” roadster powered by a motorcycle engine.

It’s hard to imagine too many teenagers tackling projects of that magnitude these days. To be fair, young people today are likely to have skills that earlier generations never dreamed of—building Web sites, say, or editing digital movies. But manipulating pixels and working with physical materials aren’t quite the same thing.

Does this matter? And if people are becoming less mechanically handy, is that so bad? I think so—and not just because specialization is for insects. Continued...

Car Design Flaws - If It’s Already Broke, Why Do I Have to Fix It? - Popular Mechanics

Sunday, 20 September 2009 01:13 doktorbrown Timestream Exploration - Failure

In his biweekly rant, PM’s senior automotive editor and Saturday Mechanic wonders out loud why car engineers don’t think like car mechanics—and how that’s making for more everyday headaches on the road than you deserve.

By Mike Allen

Published on: November 6, 2007

Too much of what we design and manufacture today is broken from the get-go. I can finesse or work around a lot of improperly designed user interfaces and hardware, but I shouldn’t have to—and neither should you. On more occasions than I care to remember, I’ve had to make or modify a lot of tools in my shop to take something apart and/or put it back together, often in the wee hours of the morning. A lot of people without the skills or time to make tools and parts are totally adrift when confronted with mechanical tasks like these. Too many people have abandoned working on their own cars, and I’d bet a lot of that comes from seeing the way things are engineered. Tasks that should be simple are instead very complicated because someone didn’t think through the consequences of their design. Let’s take something as simple as spark-plug access.