Friday
My weekend started out so well. Got my new bowling ball, and was doing pretty well with it on friday.
On my way home from the bowling alley a nice grinding noise came from the right front on my suzuki sidekick. I got pissed because I knew it for what it was right away, a brake pad worn down to the steel backing. Why didn't the wear tab alert me earlier?!
So I go straight home using mostly engine braking to slow down. (it's a stick) get it into the driveway, and go to take the wheel off. I recently had a new set of tires put on, and they apparently forgot what a torque stick was. My 400 ft/lb impact couldn't get the lug nuts off. I had to use my gigantic 1400 ft/lb impact to get them off. Stupid Discount Tire. So at about 10:00 PM I am out in my driveway making tons of noise. Thanks neighbers for not getting pissed.
So I get the wheel off and look though the inspection slot at the pads. Yep, the inboard is all the way to the backing pad. But the outboard looks almost brand new. Well, that explains how it wore down to the backing plate in about 15000 miles. The slide was stuck, so only the piston was moving, and only wearing the inboard pad.
I put the wheel back on and go to sleep, planning on doing a brake job on saturday.
Saturday
It's an excellent day outside and I plan on having lots of fun. Then I remember I have a brake job to do. Damn.
I go to the loal auto parts store (in my dodge) that I go to because the sevice is great. (the prices are a little higher then pepboys and murray's, but the people there are nice, so they get my business.)
Anyway, I go in and tell them I need 2 brake rotors, high temp grease, and pads for my Suzuki. They go over and punch it up in their computer (which sucks, they had to type my address 3 different times on 3 different screens. bah.) and see that they have a brake rotor in stock. Let me repeat that, because it bears repeating. they had ONE brake rotor in stock. I ask them how many they usually, stock, and they said one. WTF? Who in their right mind would only replace ONE rotor? You do them in pairs, a single one doesn't help at all. Either have 2 or none.
So they go to order it and type my address in 3 different places because evryone needs to know my address so they can send me snail mail spam. Great. I ask if they have pads, and they say they have 3 dfferent kinds and over 50 sets in stock. I ask them to toss one of the best sets on the side because I will need them sunday when I come to get the rotors.
I have nothing better to do now, so I go help my dad put in a new deck.
Then, at about 10:00 PM I get a call from a buddy to go out to the bar. Sure. We get to the bar and there is a $5 cover for some stupid 'dueling piano's' or some crap. It was annoying that I had to pay $5 for the privelege of spending money. I make a note on my phone to yell at the owner and get some free drinks to recoup my $5.
While at the bar, we play darts. I am a total novice. But I am ON. Holy crap. If I am lucky out of the 3 darts you throw a round, I can hit 1 within about 2" of where I aim. I was dead on accurate, and threw 3 straight rounds of triple 20's. Woot.
After that, we all go home. I pull into my driveway and turn off the ignition. Then I see a flash from under the hood and a little smoke come out. It came from where my isolation relay is. Crap, I think, I just blew my battery relay. For those that don't know, I have a 12,000 lb winch in my truck, with 2 red top optimas in a custom rear bumper with my regular battery in the engine compartment. There is 20 feet of 2/0 (yes, 2/0 not 2 gauge) cable that connects the relay to the rear batteries.
So the little flash? Yea. That turns into a TON of smoke and now I see fire under the cowling. I pop the hood and see that my brake lines that run from my ABS controller and down to mount points on the frame are glowing red. Bright read. and a wiring harness that controls the relay and my winch is now in fire. Just to make it interesting, my winch is now spooling 1/2 inch aricraft cable out into the street.
I bust out a gigantic halon extinguisher (20 lbs I think) and put out the fire. Then it starts up again littelry as soon as I stop pulling the extingusiher. And I hear something furiously boiling. Crap, my battery is boiling and is going to explode (hydrogen buildup + open flame = boom) Remember, this is about 2:00 AM and I can't see anything. There was dark. Lots and lots of dark. Except for the piecses of some plastic melting and falling to the driveway.
I run into the garage and turn on my 3500 watt halogen lights on a 6' boom so night becomes day in my driveway and get my safety glasses, face shield, welding gloves and 2 of my 4 bicarbonate extinguishers. I use those extinguishers and the fire stays out this time. But my brake lines are still glowing BRIGHT red, and the relay appears to be welded to where I mounted it on the cowling and smoking. I'm not touching that. I pull out the fuse for my winch to stop it from spooling. It doens't help. It is being corss fed somewhere. I start pulling all the fuses out until it stops. There is now about 90 feet of cable in the street behind my truck.
It appears that all 3 batteries are shorted to the brake line somewhere, and the full output of 3 batteries is being discharged into the brake lines. My engine compartment battery has 1200 CCA at 32 degrees, plus the 2 optimas at > 750 CCA's, so somewhere in the neighberhood of 2700 amps is being fed into the little 3/16" diameter thinwall brake lines. But I don't have any cable near my brake lines. WTF is going on!
I disconnect the engine battery, no change. I jump under the rear of the truck and start taking off the rocksheild (1/8" re-enforced plate steel) to get to the batteries in the bumper. of course 2 of the bolts are siezed from the salt they put down in the winter here and it takes me about 90 seconds to get them off. All the while I am looking at the 2/0 battery cable above my head, which only confuses me.
There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the battery cable. It looks normal. I tentitively touch it with my glove, I can't feel any heat. I take off the gove, and it feels slightly warm, just above ambiant. I don't think there is any current going though it, but I decide to undo the batteries anyway, just to be sure.
I finaly get the sield off and undo the 2 batteries from the main line and go check under the hood. Sweet, the brake lines are no longer glowing red. That 2/0 wire was carrying in the range of 1500 amps without heating up at all. I certainly overbuilt it. Go me. I actually bought 4/0 cable to do it with first, but It was too big so I went with 2/0. Seems like 2/) was just fine.
I check under the hood to check for any other issues. I don't find any so I wrap the 4 positive connections in electrical tape to prevent more issues, then I go in, take 2 tylenol for a headache, and take a shower to get the grass and rocks out of my hair. Then go to sleep, looking forward to the mess on sunday.
Sunday
I go out to look at my truck. I have to walk by my suzuki which has no brakes on the way. Great. No vehicles.
There is bicarbonate everywhere from the extinguishers. It had rained during the night, which just made it worse. I also notice that there is a ton of melted bicarbonate on the exaust manifold. That's gonna smell nice later.
I check out the wiring harness, and notice that a good 12" of it is burned to cinders. Great. I look at the battery isolation relay, and notice that it really was welded to the cowling. I also notice that the ground wire from the frame to to the engine battery is totaly melted and fried. The insulation was totaly gone. I didn't notice that the night before. It actually got so hot it melted into 2 pieces, but not before cutting though my air inlet tube for my engine like a hot knife though butter. Great. The entire current of anything griunded to the frame would have had to go though this little 12 gauge wire. Stupid Dodge. When I replaced the battery on my suzuki, the ground wire was 10 gauge, and I replaced it with 4 gauge. Should have did that on my truck too.
I look at the battery relay, and see that I get continuity between the battery cable mount points and the steel mounting brackets. It had shorted internally and grounded itself. Nice. Good fricking job Painless. You suck. I didn't spend $90 on this for a piece of crap. I could have used a ford starter relay for $8 and done the same thing, and those won't ground to the case.
The case got so hot that the 2 screws I screwed it in to the cowling with both softened and sheared off allowing the relay to fall about 2" (before the ledge on the cowling stopped it) into a wiring harness. Thanks, another melted harness. screw you Home Depot screw vendor company.
So what happened is that the 3 batteries amnperage was rerouted into the body of the truck. The power tried to go though the little wussy 12 gauge wire (30 amps max or so) and it couldn't handle the 2700 odd amps it was asked to handle (a little beyond the design specs of a 12 gauge wire) and melted all the way though.
Then, the current had to find another path. Well, next easiest was apparently the steel brake lines though the hold down clamps. I check out the brake fluid resovoir, and noice the brake fluid is now an interesting color of black. The boiling dound was actually the brake fluid flash boiling. Based on the color of the lines, the tempeature was in the 1900-2200 degrees range. A little beyond the boiling point of DOT3, which is about 315 IIRC. I think the brakes are toast.
So I decide to leave my truck and go get my rotors from advance. I get there and they have them out on the counter. Excellent. Except my pads are missing. They tell me their computer was off and they had none. Of any brand. Why didn't you call me? I gave you my phone number 3 times, geez. You suck Advance. I go across town to another place to get my pads.
I get home and do the brake job. The caliper slide was stuck. Easy fix. Put on the rotors pads, greased everything up, cleaned everything off, and hit the road for testing. No issues. Pulled back intot he driveway and got out andd looked down. #%!% Right there are the 2 locking washers for the caliper mouting bolts. Stupid me ARRG! I take the drivers side back apart and put it back together, and test it out again. No issues. Sweet, one thing done.
Back to the truck. I start pulling out chared wiring, and see that all of it is wiring I put in for the winch controller, battery relay and such. Great, that means it is not needed for the truck to run. I pull all the cabling out along with the melted relay and go over the truck again looking for any other grounding paths and don't find any. It appears I got everything.
I pull out my DVOM and check the ampearge pull between the engine battery and the power cable. 2.5 amps. Sweet, no more short. I hook up the battery cable and don't see any sparks or glowing anything. I go in the cab and turn the key to run. the computer goes though its normal checks, no problems. Ok, moment of truth. I trun the key to start, and it fires right up.
Ok, now I can pull it up the driveway out of the street. I push on the brakes. they go to the floor. I do it again. To the floor. Well, I kinda figured they were toast anyway. I inch up the driveway and park it and park the suzuki behind it. Now I know what I need pretty much an entire new brake system on my truck. Just what I needed. at least my vacation at work is scheduled in 3 weeks so I can plan and do it all then.
Well, it's 5:10 PM on sunday, and I just got a page from one of my programs at work while I was typing this. It's broke. Great.
Cliff notes
1. Friday: Suzuki's brakes go out.
2. Saturday Morning: Order new brake parts for sunday delivery.
3. Saturday Night: Dodge ram wire harness starts on fire due to ~2700 amp electrical short from 3 batteries though a brake line ground.
4. sunday morning: Go to pick up parts for suzuki sunday morning, some are missing.
5. sunday morning: Get missing parts for suzuki somewhere else
6. use 1400 ft/lb impact to remove lug nuts put on by crazy discount tire guy.
7. Fix suzuki. Forget lock washers for brakes.
8. Sunday afternoon: Install lock washers.
9. Sunday afternoon: remove melted Painless (my ass it's painlesS) relay and wiring.
10. Sunday Afternoon: find that barkes are non-functional on dodge due to 2000+ degrees heating.
11. Sunday late afternnon: Get page from work saying stuff is broken.
Pics
Main Cast:
Painless Relay
Burnt brake lines
Used Extinguishers
End Results
Old Brake rotors
Supporting Cast:
4 gauge Vs My Cable (4 gauge is standard battery cable)
That's serious cable
Custom light arm
400 Ft/Lb impact gun
1400 ft/lb impact gun
Neglected:
Go cart
**** Update ***
I just fixed the brakes on the Ram. I bent up new lines for everyhing from the master cyl to the frame mounts. Stupid Dodge used european bubble flares on one side of the lines and standard doubble flares on the other side so you couldn't buy them anywhere. I had to buy a european flaring tool to go along with the inverted flaring tool I already had.
I spent the afternoon bleeding the ststem and went through 3 quarts of synthetic fluid doing it. I flushed the entire system because the existing fluid was jet black.
Stops perfectly now
Now I have to repair the wiring harnesses. Almost done.
<edit>
Errant closing [lB] tag, spelling and pics
My weekend started out so well. Got my new bowling ball, and was doing pretty well with it on friday.
On my way home from the bowling alley a nice grinding noise came from the right front on my suzuki sidekick. I got pissed because I knew it for what it was right away, a brake pad worn down to the steel backing. Why didn't the wear tab alert me earlier?!
So I go straight home using mostly engine braking to slow down. (it's a stick) get it into the driveway, and go to take the wheel off. I recently had a new set of tires put on, and they apparently forgot what a torque stick was. My 400 ft/lb impact couldn't get the lug nuts off. I had to use my gigantic 1400 ft/lb impact to get them off. Stupid Discount Tire. So at about 10:00 PM I am out in my driveway making tons of noise. Thanks neighbers for not getting pissed.
So I get the wheel off and look though the inspection slot at the pads. Yep, the inboard is all the way to the backing pad. But the outboard looks almost brand new. Well, that explains how it wore down to the backing plate in about 15000 miles. The slide was stuck, so only the piston was moving, and only wearing the inboard pad.
I put the wheel back on and go to sleep, planning on doing a brake job on saturday.
Saturday
It's an excellent day outside and I plan on having lots of fun. Then I remember I have a brake job to do. Damn.
I go to the loal auto parts store (in my dodge) that I go to because the sevice is great. (the prices are a little higher then pepboys and murray's, but the people there are nice, so they get my business.)
Anyway, I go in and tell them I need 2 brake rotors, high temp grease, and pads for my Suzuki. They go over and punch it up in their computer (which sucks, they had to type my address 3 different times on 3 different screens. bah.) and see that they have a brake rotor in stock. Let me repeat that, because it bears repeating. they had ONE brake rotor in stock. I ask them how many they usually, stock, and they said one. WTF? Who in their right mind would only replace ONE rotor? You do them in pairs, a single one doesn't help at all. Either have 2 or none.
So they go to order it and type my address in 3 different places because evryone needs to know my address so they can send me snail mail spam. Great. I ask if they have pads, and they say they have 3 dfferent kinds and over 50 sets in stock. I ask them to toss one of the best sets on the side because I will need them sunday when I come to get the rotors.
I have nothing better to do now, so I go help my dad put in a new deck.
Then, at about 10:00 PM I get a call from a buddy to go out to the bar. Sure. We get to the bar and there is a $5 cover for some stupid 'dueling piano's' or some crap. It was annoying that I had to pay $5 for the privelege of spending money. I make a note on my phone to yell at the owner and get some free drinks to recoup my $5.
While at the bar, we play darts. I am a total novice. But I am ON. Holy crap. If I am lucky out of the 3 darts you throw a round, I can hit 1 within about 2" of where I aim. I was dead on accurate, and threw 3 straight rounds of triple 20's. Woot.
After that, we all go home. I pull into my driveway and turn off the ignition. Then I see a flash from under the hood and a little smoke come out. It came from where my isolation relay is. Crap, I think, I just blew my battery relay. For those that don't know, I have a 12,000 lb winch in my truck, with 2 red top optimas in a custom rear bumper with my regular battery in the engine compartment. There is 20 feet of 2/0 (yes, 2/0 not 2 gauge) cable that connects the relay to the rear batteries.
So the little flash? Yea. That turns into a TON of smoke and now I see fire under the cowling. I pop the hood and see that my brake lines that run from my ABS controller and down to mount points on the frame are glowing red. Bright read. and a wiring harness that controls the relay and my winch is now in fire. Just to make it interesting, my winch is now spooling 1/2 inch aricraft cable out into the street.
I bust out a gigantic halon extinguisher (20 lbs I think) and put out the fire. Then it starts up again littelry as soon as I stop pulling the extingusiher. And I hear something furiously boiling. Crap, my battery is boiling and is going to explode (hydrogen buildup + open flame = boom) Remember, this is about 2:00 AM and I can't see anything. There was dark. Lots and lots of dark. Except for the piecses of some plastic melting and falling to the driveway.
I run into the garage and turn on my 3500 watt halogen lights on a 6' boom so night becomes day in my driveway and get my safety glasses, face shield, welding gloves and 2 of my 4 bicarbonate extinguishers. I use those extinguishers and the fire stays out this time. But my brake lines are still glowing BRIGHT red, and the relay appears to be welded to where I mounted it on the cowling and smoking. I'm not touching that. I pull out the fuse for my winch to stop it from spooling. It doens't help. It is being corss fed somewhere. I start pulling all the fuses out until it stops. There is now about 90 feet of cable in the street behind my truck.
It appears that all 3 batteries are shorted to the brake line somewhere, and the full output of 3 batteries is being discharged into the brake lines. My engine compartment battery has 1200 CCA at 32 degrees, plus the 2 optimas at > 750 CCA's, so somewhere in the neighberhood of 2700 amps is being fed into the little 3/16" diameter thinwall brake lines. But I don't have any cable near my brake lines. WTF is going on!
I disconnect the engine battery, no change. I jump under the rear of the truck and start taking off the rocksheild (1/8" re-enforced plate steel) to get to the batteries in the bumper. of course 2 of the bolts are siezed from the salt they put down in the winter here and it takes me about 90 seconds to get them off. All the while I am looking at the 2/0 battery cable above my head, which only confuses me.
There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with the battery cable. It looks normal. I tentitively touch it with my glove, I can't feel any heat. I take off the gove, and it feels slightly warm, just above ambiant. I don't think there is any current going though it, but I decide to undo the batteries anyway, just to be sure.
I finaly get the sield off and undo the 2 batteries from the main line and go check under the hood. Sweet, the brake lines are no longer glowing red. That 2/0 wire was carrying in the range of 1500 amps without heating up at all. I certainly overbuilt it. Go me. I actually bought 4/0 cable to do it with first, but It was too big so I went with 2/0. Seems like 2/) was just fine.
I check under the hood to check for any other issues. I don't find any so I wrap the 4 positive connections in electrical tape to prevent more issues, then I go in, take 2 tylenol for a headache, and take a shower to get the grass and rocks out of my hair. Then go to sleep, looking forward to the mess on sunday.
Sunday
I go out to look at my truck. I have to walk by my suzuki which has no brakes on the way. Great. No vehicles.
There is bicarbonate everywhere from the extinguishers. It had rained during the night, which just made it worse. I also notice that there is a ton of melted bicarbonate on the exaust manifold. That's gonna smell nice later.
I check out the wiring harness, and notice that a good 12" of it is burned to cinders. Great. I look at the battery isolation relay, and notice that it really was welded to the cowling. I also notice that the ground wire from the frame to to the engine battery is totaly melted and fried. The insulation was totaly gone. I didn't notice that the night before. It actually got so hot it melted into 2 pieces, but not before cutting though my air inlet tube for my engine like a hot knife though butter. Great. The entire current of anything griunded to the frame would have had to go though this little 12 gauge wire. Stupid Dodge. When I replaced the battery on my suzuki, the ground wire was 10 gauge, and I replaced it with 4 gauge. Should have did that on my truck too.
I look at the battery relay, and see that I get continuity between the battery cable mount points and the steel mounting brackets. It had shorted internally and grounded itself. Nice. Good fricking job Painless. You suck. I didn't spend $90 on this for a piece of crap. I could have used a ford starter relay for $8 and done the same thing, and those won't ground to the case.
The case got so hot that the 2 screws I screwed it in to the cowling with both softened and sheared off allowing the relay to fall about 2" (before the ledge on the cowling stopped it) into a wiring harness. Thanks, another melted harness. screw you Home Depot screw vendor company.
So what happened is that the 3 batteries amnperage was rerouted into the body of the truck. The power tried to go though the little wussy 12 gauge wire (30 amps max or so) and it couldn't handle the 2700 odd amps it was asked to handle (a little beyond the design specs of a 12 gauge wire) and melted all the way though.
Then, the current had to find another path. Well, next easiest was apparently the steel brake lines though the hold down clamps. I check out the brake fluid resovoir, and noice the brake fluid is now an interesting color of black. The boiling dound was actually the brake fluid flash boiling. Based on the color of the lines, the tempeature was in the 1900-2200 degrees range. A little beyond the boiling point of DOT3, which is about 315 IIRC. I think the brakes are toast.
So I decide to leave my truck and go get my rotors from advance. I get there and they have them out on the counter. Excellent. Except my pads are missing. They tell me their computer was off and they had none. Of any brand. Why didn't you call me? I gave you my phone number 3 times, geez. You suck Advance. I go across town to another place to get my pads.
I get home and do the brake job. The caliper slide was stuck. Easy fix. Put on the rotors pads, greased everything up, cleaned everything off, and hit the road for testing. No issues. Pulled back intot he driveway and got out andd looked down. #%!% Right there are the 2 locking washers for the caliper mouting bolts. Stupid me ARRG! I take the drivers side back apart and put it back together, and test it out again. No issues. Sweet, one thing done.
Back to the truck. I start pulling out chared wiring, and see that all of it is wiring I put in for the winch controller, battery relay and such. Great, that means it is not needed for the truck to run. I pull all the cabling out along with the melted relay and go over the truck again looking for any other grounding paths and don't find any. It appears I got everything.
I pull out my DVOM and check the ampearge pull between the engine battery and the power cable. 2.5 amps. Sweet, no more short. I hook up the battery cable and don't see any sparks or glowing anything. I go in the cab and turn the key to run. the computer goes though its normal checks, no problems. Ok, moment of truth. I trun the key to start, and it fires right up.
Ok, now I can pull it up the driveway out of the street. I push on the brakes. they go to the floor. I do it again. To the floor. Well, I kinda figured they were toast anyway. I inch up the driveway and park it and park the suzuki behind it. Now I know what I need pretty much an entire new brake system on my truck. Just what I needed. at least my vacation at work is scheduled in 3 weeks so I can plan and do it all then.
Well, it's 5:10 PM on sunday, and I just got a page from one of my programs at work while I was typing this. It's broke. Great.
Cliff notes
1. Friday: Suzuki's brakes go out.
2. Saturday Morning: Order new brake parts for sunday delivery.
3. Saturday Night: Dodge ram wire harness starts on fire due to ~2700 amp electrical short from 3 batteries though a brake line ground.
4. sunday morning: Go to pick up parts for suzuki sunday morning, some are missing.
5. sunday morning: Get missing parts for suzuki somewhere else
6. use 1400 ft/lb impact to remove lug nuts put on by crazy discount tire guy.
7. Fix suzuki. Forget lock washers for brakes.
8. Sunday afternoon: Install lock washers.
9. Sunday afternoon: remove melted Painless (my ass it's painlesS) relay and wiring.
10. Sunday Afternoon: find that barkes are non-functional on dodge due to 2000+ degrees heating.
11. Sunday late afternnon: Get page from work saying stuff is broken.
Pics
Main Cast:
Painless Relay
Burnt brake lines
Used Extinguishers
End Results
Old Brake rotors
Supporting Cast:
4 gauge Vs My Cable (4 gauge is standard battery cable)
That's serious cable
Custom light arm
400 Ft/Lb impact gun
1400 ft/lb impact gun
Neglected:
Go cart
**** Update ***
I just fixed the brakes on the Ram. I bent up new lines for everyhing from the master cyl to the frame mounts. Stupid Dodge used european bubble flares on one side of the lines and standard doubble flares on the other side so you couldn't buy them anywhere. I had to buy a european flaring tool to go along with the inverted flaring tool I already had.
I spent the afternoon bleeding the ststem and went through 3 quarts of synthetic fluid doing it. I flushed the entire system because the existing fluid was jet black.
Stops perfectly now
Now I have to repair the wiring harnesses. Almost done.
<edit>
Errant closing [lB] tag, spelling and pics