At 05:25 PM 3/11/03 -0600, MonteMorris wrote:
>If the rear brake cylinders are not leaking fluid and are working
>properly, is there any reason to tear into them while I'm checking out the
>brake shoes, replacing brake/clutch hoses, troubleshooting a
>non-functioning emergency brake, and replacing the brake fluid? "If it's
>not broke, don't fix it?"
This depends on a few things. I try not to scare people by inflating the
level of risk, but this is brakes you're talking about. If it has been
more than 10 years since it was last done, or the history of the car is
unknown, I'd fix it.
There are many things on a car that deteriorate with time, and this is one
of them. At some point in time it will likely fail, you just don't know
when. When it does happen, maybe you could be lucky and it will be only a
little fluid leak that will bug you until you fix it. Or there's an
outside chance that it might be more serious, and maybe you wouldn't want
to take the chance.
This situation takes on a little different appearance when you consider the
car as a whole. The key here is what level of reliability you want. The
importance of this may depend some on how much you drive the car and how
important it is not to be inconvenienced on any given day (like in the
middle of an endurance rally for instance). When you have a lot of small
items on the car that are likely to have an occasional failure, and these
are all getting to a certain age or an unknown age, then you will be having
some occasional unpredictable failures around the car. The older the car
is, the more these nagging little items will jump up to bite you. This is
one of the better reasons for doing a full restoration, so you know for
certain the time since each part of the car was serviced.
Even when you are not doing a full restoration, you can still make some
sound decisions on what gets "fixed" before failure and what doesn't. I
put different priorities on various parts of the car, with the highest
emphisis on safety items, next in line for things that keep the car running
down the road, and lowest priority for appearance accessories. Brake parts
are right at the top of this list. So if you're not sure about the part,
this would be a very good place to apply some effort at improving the
overall reliability of your car. It is comforting to have brake parts as a
known quantity rather than an open question.
Barney Gaylord
1958 MGA with an attitude
http://MGAguru.com
/// or try http://www.team.net/cgi-bin/majorcool
/// Archives at http://www.team.net/archive
|