Braking Bad

It started with the ChevOldsmobuiac. It was the morning before I was leaving town for a long business trip. The wife and I drove to breakfast, and we noted that the exhaust resonance was a bit loud. "I'll check the mounts when I get back," I thought. She dutifully set the parking brake when we stopped, and we enjoyed a wonderful breakfast.

When we got back in the car, the noise was a bajillion times worse, and the car felt like it was dragging a dead water-buffalo. We limped drug home, and I changed clothes in the vain hope that I could enact a repair in the few hours before the flight.

Laying under the car, it was obvious that the muffler had torn free of its mount. By this I do not mean rusty metal popping free, rather that shiney clean sheet metal on a fairly new muffler had been curled back by vibrational stress. That will have to be welded before it will pass inspection again, but in the short term, I applied some coat hanger wire to buttress the mount.

Engine noise problem solved.

The lack of urgency was more curious. I jacked up the rear wheels and found that the right rear wheel wouldn't rotate foward: a sign that the parking brake was stuck on. I pulled the wheel and beat the brake drum off with my deadblow hammer. After some fiddling, I determined that the brake cable had seized, quite likely due to the hot exhaust pipe laying across it. In the hopes that my fiddling got some slack back, I pushed the drum back on, and drove the car around the block. Yes, I got some slack out of the cable, but not enough to let the wheel coast free. The car was dead in the water until I got back.

Fortunately, there was the other old standby: the Volvo.

Which worked great, until either last night, or today, when the brake pedal started to go limp. No one remembers when exactly it started, but it was fine all week. Today, it felt a little mushy on the way to work. When I got to the parking lot, I checked for fluid leaks, but found no puddles or seeps. On the way home, it was even worse, the pedal required pumping and nearly bottomed out. I drove ultra conservatively and massively downshifted to bleed speed.

So, now we have one car that is essentially an immobile hulk and another that is an uncontrollable high speed death trap.

That leaves the motorcycle and a bicycle, and there's a 70% chance of thunderstorms tomorrow.