Headed Back East – 1/20/2013
Jan 20th, 2013 by admin
There’s not much sleep over night. John keeps waking. We he gets up I wake. We’re both concerned. It would have been better for this brake problem to have happened earlier in the day but it didn’t. Dawn comes and John is up and out to the car.
He’s just getting out the jack and assorted equipment we’ll need to jack the car up and take the wheel and brake drum off. Hopefully the problem and maybe even the solution will be obvious.
Loosen the lug nuts. Place the jack under the axle. Start jacking the car up. Damn this thing is heavy. And the factory jack can just barely lift the still loaded vehicle. We probably should have used the big bumper jack but we didn’t. Grind away on the crank until the right rear wheel is off the ground.
John has the wheel off and then the brake drum off. And the problem is obvious: the brake shoe adjuster wheel has backed off and the locking bar is not touching the adjuster wheel which is what prevents the adjuster wheel from backing off.
This is exactly what caused the problem that I had when I first left Brisbane. Then the Midas shop in Gosford said that the reason the brakes worked when pumped but didn’t on the first pedal push was that the adjuster had backed off and the right rear brake shoes weren’t contacting the drum. The fix had been to re-adjust the brakes and then bend the locking bar back into position so that the adjuster wheel couldn’t back off.
Now, I’m looking at exactly the same problem. Well, at least we know what to do to fix the problem. Of course, we don’t know why we have had the problem in the first place and twice to make matters all the more confusing.
We adjust the brakes. We were are both old enough to remember drum barkes and both have done brake adjustments in the past. Not very many cars have drum brakes any more and even fewer owners do their own brake adjustments. An advantage to being old, I guess.
We can’t do anything about the locking lever so we put some zip ties on the threaded area of the adjuster road to prevent the adjuster wheel for backing off due to vibration. WE also adjust the parking brake so the it works. The cable had been stretched to a point where the brakes weren’t being engaged. It may have been maladjusted during one of the brake jobs we’ve had done. In any event, it’s adjusted and working now.
Put the brake drum and wheel back on and jack the car back down. Run it back and forth a couple of times and everything seems fine. Pack the gear back in the car and leave.
Just a kilometer down the road, I feel a vibration and hear a clunking sound. Pull off the road and head right to the left front shock which is dangling from the top mount. Damn, damn, damn!!! We know this problem only too well.
Turn the front wheels so we can see the shock lower mount which is broken again and somewhat dinged up from bouncing off the suspension parts and the steering knuckle. The shock doesn’t appear to be too badly damaged and the mounting bracket (the part that the Russian mechanical genius, Ilya, had hand-made for us in Chelyabinsk last August) wasn’t broken. The front bolt that held the mounting bar in place had broken and made it’s escape on the road somewhere.
This had to have just happened. There was no indication of a problem last night and we didn’t notice it when we were working on the brakes though we didn’t actually check the shock until now. Whatever. We know what to do and since the mounting bracket is still useable all we need are a bolt, a nut and some washers. Take the shock off. Put the tools back in the car. And drive off. With no brakes!!!!
I’m shocked. I thought that since we had already had and fixed this problem once and then driven 1,000’s of kilometers without a problem, that we knew what the problem was and had fix it. This is really surprising.
Okay, think. What are the symptoms? The brakes fail suddenly. Usually after a sharp left-hand turn. The problem usually goes away if the car is immediately driven in the opposite direction and the brakes applied. The usual suspect, the right rear brake, has just been re-adjusted and locked into position. Now the shock mount has failed and the shock has been bouncing off the left front suspension.
We look where the left front shock had been bouncing loose but we don’t see anything obvious. The thing that’s really gnawing at me is that the problem goes away if we reverse direction and apply the brakes. That indicates that the ABS system (Anti-lock Baking System) maybe the culprit.
The ABS system lights an indicator on the dash when there is a brake problem and every time that the brakes have failed, the indicator has gone on and every time that we’ve reversed direction, applied the brakes and had good pedal, the light has gone off. The ABS system is looking more and more like the culprit.
The ABS system is very complex. There are sensors on the wheels, a computer dedicated to running the ABS system, a solenoid block that controls brake fluid to a brake assembly and wiring the connects all of the equipment. And any part of this system could be the cause of the problem if the problem is in the ABS system. The intermittent nature of the problem certainly leads us to suspect a component or connection.
The ABS system is designed to provide direction control during panic stops. Without ABS, in a panic stop a car will generally stop in a straight line if all the wheels continue turning. Unfortunately, in a panic stop the brakes tend to lock the wheels and as soon as a wheel locks the car starts to spin. The only way to prevent this is to prevent the wheels from locking in the first place.
In a car that has ABS, the wheel sensors send pulses to the ABS computer and the computer uses the pulses to determine the speed of each wheel. When the computer determines that a wheel has stopped turning and the car is about to start spinning, the computer sends a signal to the solenoid block that controls the flow of brake fluid to the each brake to release the brake for the stopped wheel for a few milliseconds.
The result is that for a few milliseconds, there is no braking on the offended wheel. When working correctly, the ABS sensor starts sending pulses to the system computer and it lets the wheel start to rotate and the car continues to stop in a straight line. After a few milliseconds the computer closes the solenoid valve and the brake system puts pressure on the brake system. If the wheel sensor still doesn’t send pulses, the whole procedure is repeated.
If anything goes wrong with the system, the results, as they say, may be unpredictable. We’re certainly having unpredictable results. And checking all the wiring and connections isn’t really feasible on the side of the road.
There is a simple solution: pull the fuse on the AB system so that it doesn’t work at all. We are suspecting that for some reason (wheel sensor, wiring, connector, solenoid) the solenoid block is allows a one or more of the brakes solenoids to open and remain open de-pressuring the brake lines and causing us to have very low brakes (we do have brakes if you pump them.) When the solenoid(s) close we have a hard brake pedal again.
We pull the fuse and test the car. We have brakes. Turn sharp left (many of the failures happened after a sharp left turn). No problem. Forward and brake. No problem. Reverse and brake. No problem. Pack up, close the hood, head for Tennant Creek.
We travel the 100 or so kilometers to Tennant Creek with no problems at all. Drive. Try the brakes. Fine. Slow down and pull off the road. Sharp left turns. No problem. Drive on to Tennant Creek.
Tennant Creek is pretty much still asleep when we get there just before 10AM. Tennant has a reputation as a pretty rough town and a typical Saturday night probably ensures a late Sunday morning.
But there’s a general hardware store open. We park and go in. We only need a bolt, washers and a nut to repair the shock mount. The have what we need and we get a few spares for insurance. Off to find a place in the shade to re-install the shock.
Just down the street is the Tennant Creek Transportation Center, the taxi stand and bus station. There’s not much activity and it has a roof. Pull under the cover and we start working.
The whole install takes longer to get the tools out than it does to re-install the shock. We opened and closed the shock a few times to check the travel and the bouncing about doesn’t seem to have hurt the shock at all.
Just as we’re finishing up the install, a man comes over to chat. He’s curious about the American flags we have next to our names and the UK Union Jack that Clemo put on the car in the Ukraine. He’s even more interested in the trip. But suddenly his pizza’s ready (the Transportation Center is also the home to Rocky’s Pizza – you never know when you’ll need pizza for a late breakkie) and he’s gone. We pack up and we’re gone, too.
We go north for a bit on the Stuart Highway and then turn east on the Barkly Highway.. This is the main east-west highway in Australia and we start seeing more and more road trains, trucks similar to our 18 wheelers with 2 or 3 trailers. There’s a sign on the road edge warning that the road trains can be up to 53.5 meters (that’s about 176 feet) long. You’d better have enough straightaway to make that pass.
There’s not much traffic and we move right along. The speed limit in the NT is 130 kph (that’s 81 mph) but that’s seems a bit fast for the car when we really don’t know whether we’ve solved our brake problem. We haven’t had a problem for hours now since we pulled the ABS fuse but we can’t say that we’ve solved the problem either.
As we move east the range land we pass through is known as the Tablelands and for good reason. Though everything is very green and in some places almost lush, the land is tabletop flat as far as the eye can see. And nothing out there except an occasional windmill or microwave tower. Not even cattle.
We finally cross into Queensland and leave the Northern Territory. This isn’t the coastal Queensland. This is the outback Queensland, lush and green now, desert when there’s no rain. And the road just continues straight to the east with some unexplainable slight turn in the road just to break the boredom.
The road goes on like this for mile after mile. We eventually get to Camooweal where there is a fuel stop and motels. We’re thinking of going north to Riversleigh, a famous World Heritage fossil dig but that depends on the road conditions and how much rain they’ve gotten. The farther north, the more rain. It’s becoming monsoon season in the north.
We stop for the night in a small hotel with a pub and a swimming pool. A few beers and then a laundry. Out of clean undies and t-shirts. While we’re waiting for the laundry we meet an Aussie family that finally after 2 years of travel going home to Darwin. They’d spent 9 months traveling the US and the rest of the time in Europe and Russia and now touring Australia. In a very small Mitsubishi Lancer.
We have a nice chat comparing notes on some of the places we’d all been to. We leave for dinner back down at the Camooweal Roadhouse and then back to the motel. A lousy movie and then bed.
Obi-wan