Ive always found it helps to understand basic concepts, of how components on your car function or at least how they are supposed to function.
one of my housing development neighbors who I seldom talk with came over B.S. and complain about how he had just paid over $500 to get his brake rotors turned and new brake pads installed on his 1967 Pontiac GTO front brakes ,and new brake shoes on the rear drum brakes, on the car which he seldom drives,, at one of the local fly by night repair centers because he had been quoted even more at a dealership.
It seems that the cars brakes took a good deal of petal pressure to get the car to stop, and while the new pads and shoes on the car help the car still doesn,t stop like he remembers it doing. I ask him how long it had been since his last brake job and he said it was less than 20K miles so I ask him to let me drive the car around the block and try the brakes, it was very obvious the brake booster was not working correctly so after checking the brake fluid level and looking for a loose or leaking vacuum hose I soon located the problem and a little epoxy cement to repair a cracked plastic fitting until he can locate a replacement got the cars brakes back functioning like he remembers them working, it also cured an erratic idle speed problem .the cracked plastic fitting was causing a large lose of vacuum to the booster and I bet thats all that was wrong with the old brakes, but hes not all that mechanically involved, and failed to understand how a vacuum brake booster works, so he failed to check it out before throwing cash at the problem.
one of my housing development neighbors who I seldom talk with came over B.S. and complain about how he had just paid over $500 to get his brake rotors turned and new brake pads installed on his 1967 Pontiac GTO front brakes ,and new brake shoes on the rear drum brakes, on the car which he seldom drives,, at one of the local fly by night repair centers because he had been quoted even more at a dealership.
It seems that the cars brakes took a good deal of petal pressure to get the car to stop, and while the new pads and shoes on the car help the car still doesn,t stop like he remembers it doing. I ask him how long it had been since his last brake job and he said it was less than 20K miles so I ask him to let me drive the car around the block and try the brakes, it was very obvious the brake booster was not working correctly so after checking the brake fluid level and looking for a loose or leaking vacuum hose I soon located the problem and a little epoxy cement to repair a cracked plastic fitting until he can locate a replacement got the cars brakes back functioning like he remembers them working, it also cured an erratic idle speed problem .the cracked plastic fitting was causing a large lose of vacuum to the booster and I bet thats all that was wrong with the old brakes, but hes not all that mechanically involved, and failed to understand how a vacuum brake booster works, so he failed to check it out before throwing cash at the problem.
some idiot may think thats legit