Managed to get the front brakes renovated between rain showers on Good Friday and the Saturday before Easter.
The front calipers were a little bit sticky so had intended to do this sooner rather than later. I hadn't rebuilt a caliper before, but how hard could it be?
I had been getting the parts together for a little while, and had had them all ready to go since early Jan, but the constant rain meant I didn't really get chance to get to it. As it was I dodged the showers as best I could - get a caliper off, it starts raining. Start stripping that one, it stops raining. Run out and get the other one off, it starts again, and so on. In the end I didn't lose too much time waiting around.
In my pile of parts was a set of Genuine Volvo pads, a set of Bosch 262mm non-hub discs, a caliper rebuild kit including pistons from bigg red.
A full set of 6 flexible hoses by Febi, and some Ceratec anti-squeal paste.
First off mix up some special sauce to give me the best chance of getting the unions undone without having to make up new hard lines.
I actually like making hard lines up, and making them look identical to the original, but didn't fancy doing it in the rain and getting everything full of moisture:
After much careful cleaning with a pick and small wire brush I squirted a load on and left it for half an hour.
Whether it was the special sauce, or the fact that being a proper Volvo the lines were made out of Cupro-Nickel rather than the plastic coated steel my brother is struggling with again on his S80, I'm not sure, but all 6 came undone with a minimum of fuss.
After wire brushing as much of the old brake dust etc off the calipers as I felt necessay, a combination of compressed air from a stirrup pump, and grabbing them with molegrips got the old pistons out (I wouldn't have done the molegrips part had I intended to re-use them:
It looks as if someone had attempted to lubricate them with some kind of silvery grease (graphite?) which had subsequently hardened, which would account for the slight reluctance for them to retract after application of the brakes.
Further, where it had ended up inside the caliper it had formed a sticky silvery goo that took ages to clean out, but after quite a while with a small brass brush, most of a can of brake cleaner and lots of blue towel I had the bores looking as clean as they were going to:
With all the other removable bits dismantled (getting the remains of the old piston boots out was the hardest as they are a very tight interference fit in the caliper) it was time to lay out the rebuild kit and put them back together again.
I used just clean brake fluid used to lubricate the seals. The new pistons from bigg red had a little chamfer on them to help with pushing them in, so they went on easily.
The best way I found to do the boots was to fit the boot to the piston, press the piston into the bore an inch or so, then press the boot into the recess in the caliper, which took quite a lot of thumb pressure and patience as it would pop out one side or the other.
Anyway, eventually they were all in place and I put all the other new rubber bits on with plenty of the silicone grease. I found a 22 (or was it 24) mm socket was perfect for pressing the silver retaining rings onto the lower slide pin boots, and the quarter drive extension good for pushing the upper boot through the caliper.
Caliper brackets all cleaned up:
(Note I'm not going for flashy pretty paint jobs here, standard and functional is the order of the day)
Seating face on the hub cleaned up, then new discs fitted, calipers refitted, new pads with new spring clips and anti-squeal, and finally all six new flexi hoses fitted:
I had assumed the rebuild kit came with bleed nipples. It did not, so I have got some that I will change at some point in the future.
Whilst I was waiting for my wife to come home from town so she could do the old up-down with me
I replaced the anti-roll bar drop links with some Meyle items. I had bought the complete links as I had seen so manypeople just shear the top off when trying to undo them, but it seems I could have gotten way with just the bushes themselves as the ATF/Acetone mix worked a treat.
The old ones were a bit ropey:
Both located and tightened to 42mm between the washers:
Back to the brakes, my wife tells me we spent an hour and a quarter bleeding them.
First I found that the first in sequence kept producing air. What solved it in the end was abandoning that one, completing the rest of the sequence, the going round again. I can only surmise it was drawing air from the remainder of the triangle on that circuit, given the whole system was empty.
In the end, a litre and a half of Dot4+ went through the system fully flushing it.
They feel quite nice now after bedding them in.