whist fitting my new wheels i managed to bust my wheel cylinder - long story i cant be arsed to tell, but the moral is - DONT DO THIS - even getting it onto the back of a towtruck was a nightmare - the brakes were spitting fluid and essentially had NO power - had to use reverse/dubious clutch control to stop the thing running away

5lab wrote: had to use reverse/dubious clutch control to stop the thing running away

Why? Is your handbrake knackered?

its too knackered to stop the car on a big hill (it'll hold it, but not stop it), specially when one of the drums is full of fluid..

ouch.. £165 repair bill to get that sorted and the exhaust too.. main part of that was the labour @ £73, cos they replaced the front pipe from the exhaust... looks like i'll be walking everywhere for a while, cos i cant afford the petrol

5lab wrote:whist fitting my new wheels i managed to bust my wheel cylinder - long story i cant be arsed to tell, but the moral is - DONT DO THIS - even getting it onto the back of a towtruck was a nightmare - the brakes were spitting fluid and essentially had NO power - had to use reverse/dubious clutch control to stop the thing running away

What's the whole story? Cause I've changed a wheel cylinder in September and it's working perfectly (but you have to do that very carefuly) You made something wrong but what? Can you explain what you did?

i burst the cylendar, and decided not to change it myself cos i dont trust my mechanic skills to stop me. also i was in the middle of no-where (my parents house) and didn't know of anywhere i could get a new cylinder from that day.

how i actually broke it? i took the wheels off to swap them for my alloys, and while they were off i took the drum off to work out how the brakes worked (i'm curious like that). i was pressing the pedal down, then realised that the self-adjuster mechanism had unwound itself, and i couldnt get the drum back on. now on my bike, you re-adjust the disk brakes simply using brute force to push the pads apart, so i thought it might be the same for this. battering the brake pads with a mallet didnt work so i thought i'd try and press the brake pedal really hard. turned out i pressed it a bit.. too.. hard. i then worked out how to adjust the adjuster, but it was too late, the cylendar was gone. still, i got the garage i took it to to fix my exhaust as well (so it doesnt knock all the time, all the time.. etc) so its nice and quiet - taht work would have needed doing before the mot (next week - eeeep!) anyways.

Ok, now I understand!

Of course, if you press the brake pedal really hard without the pads close together, you'll see the sides of the cylinder flying away and the brakes fluid will leak seriously...

It's a good lesson, you won't do that again with... what's the name of your new GLT?

grace