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The One. The Only. Mr. A, Your Entertainer. On the FM in the AM.

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.

1. Loosen lug nuts
2. Use floor jack on frame rails just aft of jackstand points, one side at a time
3. 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.

As the years have gone by, we've gotten better at this.

We had become increasingly frustrated with our hosting provider, who we have been using since spring of 2005.  I decided to switch the tonekids empire over to bluehost.com.  We'll see how they work out.  Along with the laborious task of migrating over everyone's tonekids email accounts,  I decided to try out a different CMS for the website called Joomla.

On Friday, I managed to parlay my increased understanding of SQL and databases into a migration of the old dragonfly data over to the new system.  This morning, I managed to find the old-old "PHP Nuke" database, which went into mothballs when we moved into this house in the spring of 2005.  It was in a tarball on the LINUX box in the basement.  Since I had one success in migrating SQL dumps, I went and and migrated that very old stuff over, too.  I remember when doktorbrown was irritated that I had started a new content management system and lost the old stuff.  He was right.  I just didn't know at the time how to use PHP and SQL well enough to migrate the data over.

Well, we're over the learning curve now.  Every story ever posted to tonekids.com is now available here.  All of the data has come home.

If you jump to the last page of articles, which you can do at the bottom of this page, you can follow the history of tonekids.com.  Find it amusing that promises of RSS feeds and broadcasts have not yet been fulfilled.

I fear that a lot of the pre-2005 tonekids activity has been lost.  There is a lot of uncategorized material lurking in the CDs, DVDs, and old hard drives sitting around the secret lab here.  Perhaps a history can be pieced together.

We hope that we can carry forward, and continue the dreams and aspirations.

I hope that good things lie in the future.

P.S.  That is Aunt Louise looking at you from the header bar.  I am looking for the picture of her wearing the prototype alpha goggles.