Friday, April 23, 2010

Parking brake weak on Caravan 2000




The parking brake foot pedal hits the floor and the brake does not hold well. I found there is no brake cable adjustment as in many of my previous cars. The footbrake pedal assembly is suppose to automatically take up cable slack and also take up any brake pad wear. I pulled the rear wheel hubs and found a reasonable amount of brake pad like a little over 0.100 inch over the rivets of the pads. But it did not look like the pad automatic slack adjuster was not working. After blowing the dust off and removing the brake assembly parts I found all seemed to be in great shape. Even the adjustment screw turned very easily. Not sure why it is not working. Even with the hub off the adjusters did not take up slack with the brake pedal depressed. So I installed new wheel cylinders, (brake cylinders), $10.50 each. The originals would have been easy to rebuild as there was no pitting. It looked like the pistons were gummed up a little. Linda helped with bleeding the brakes. She is an expert at this and it works out easily as we can work together well. Now let time pass a little and see if the adjusters will now take up the slack. The brakes are working great except for the parking brake is still too slack.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Basement water leak is resolved. I found the 3/4 inch water line had a pinhole leak as it came through the 8 inch basement concrete wall. The hole was 1 inch from the outside and 7 inches from the inside and the 90 degree fitting. The pipe through the wall from the fitting and out into the earth 3 feet was flexible copper that was installed in 1975. The picture shows a slight kink 2 inches from the leak. The leak was where you can see the slit on the left side of the picture.








Next is a closer shot of the leak. The leak was small but after I cleaned up the pipe for examination it looks like the leak would be quite a spray now.




You can see in the next picture the leak occurred quite a was from the slight kink. I checked on the internet and leaks in water pipes occur especially in homes built prior to 1970. The reason for the corrosion causing the leak is unknown. The failure occurred in the only chunk of flexible copper that I used in our water line. About 15 years ago I reconfigured the outside line and remember making a new gentle bend in the flexible pipe, but also remember the slight kink. I am not sure if that contributed to the failure. The bad area is repaired now with standard copper pipe.



The last picture above shows the leaking copper pipe removed.