My daughter has my 2002 Honda Civic now. She lives in Michigan, about 200 miles from home. She called recently to let me know that the brakes were making noise, and that she was worried about them. Eventually, we agreed that she would take the car to the mechanic her boyfriend’s parents use (and trust), and I’d talk to them after they’d completed an estimate of the work that needed to be done.
They called a couple of days later and told me that the car needed pads, rotors and calipers on the front and shoes and new drums on the rear. Total price: $700.
Now, I know I said that I thought it was time to put the wrenches away a while back (7 Jan 2007), but when I called the local auto parts store and found out that the total cost for parts was only $230 – and I’ve done all of the work that needed to be done on different Honda cars at some time or another – I decided to do it myself, inspired by the approximately $470 in savings.
Happily, there’s no real down-side to this story, except that the Chilton manual is wrong on how it instructs you to re-install the back brakes (it can’t be done on the 2002 Civic, at least). Oh, and I cursed myself out for being too stupid to figure out how to stretch the top spring across from one shoe to the other (I’m sure there’s a tool I don’t have that would have been useful).
I finished the second part of the job last night – the front brake repair – and I have to say that, after driving the car to work today with no ill effects detected (and the car stopping like . . . something that stops . . . well) I feel pretty good about getting the job done!
No comments:
Post a Comment