Mark: Hi, it's Mark Bossert. I'm here with Bernie Pawlik, Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Vancouver's best auto service experience. Voted that by their customers 25 times in a row. Pawlik Automotive. We're talking to Bernie Pawlik, talking cars. How are you doing Bernie?
Bernie: Doing very well. Actually, we're talking trucks today.
Mark: Ah, trucks. Yes. It's a 2015 Ford Transit. What was going on with this vehicle?
Bernie: Yeah, so this is a Transit 150. It's like one of the taller vans. For some reason, when I was looking at the shop, I didn't see it come in, I thought we were working on a Sprinter. It looks like a Sprinter, but it's a Ford.
Yeah, so the owner's complaint was the brakes were grinding. Technician went for a road test, heard the grinding. We put up on the hoist and found some pretty ugly stuff. It's always a joy to take pictures and do a job on a vehicle when things look this ugly because you know you're making a big difference.
So we can get right to it. The front and rear brakes were replaced. Pretty much everything on the wheels was done as you can see by looking at this picture. Even if you've never looked at brakes, you'll look at that going something just doesn't seem right with this picture. There's an awful lot of rust there.
That little shiny spot in the centre of the brake rotor. That you're marking out there. That's supposed to be shiny all the way from edge to edge. And of course, as you can see, it's all rusted and the inside is just as bad or worse. So this thing needed a pretty major brake job.
What we're looking at here is a picture of the brake rotor removed. So these have kind of a unique design in terms of changing the brake rotor. A lot of times the brake rotor will just slide onto the wheel hub. In this case, you actually have to take the axle out. You unbolt the axle, the bolts that hold the axle to the hub actually hold the brake rotor in on the inside and they devised a kind of rather unique way to twist the rotor out.
If you, you can see some further pictures, it'll you can kind of see it, but that's basically the rotor and axle removed. If you look in behind the rotor, You can see sorry, on the inside, Mark, towards the, where the hub is, a little further to your right, you see it's kind of a hollow spot and that the rotors basically twists around that sort of flange in the hub.
So they sort of made it easy, but it's still a bit of a difficult job. So anyways, there's our view of, of the new brake rotor installed. As you can see right away, things look a lot better. That rustiness of the axle really doesn't matter. Too much. It's not a problem. We'll go to the next picture.
Again, we see another view of the rotor and hub and axle all installed and put together. One thing I will mention is we did put everything together and realized afterwards. I mean, we've done a couple of these brake jobs before, but forgot that you actually have to replace the bolts that hold the axle and rotor to the hub.
These are actually one time use only bolts, not sure why they use that on this particular application, but for some reason they do. So, yeah, those bolts there that's not in the picture here. We changed them afterwards, but on the front and rear it was required to replace all those bolts. And there you can see the new brake caliper, the old caliper, there was so much rust and corrosion we just replaced it. You know once you get rust that bad, it's going to get into the caliper piston and all the sliding parts. And never going to be redeemed with anything we can do in the shop. So we buy rebuilt calipers and put those on.
This is a view of the front. This is the front with the wheel hub removed. And interestingly enough, you actually have to take the wheel hub off and out of the vehicle. To change the rotor. It's a captive rotor. It's inside of the wheel hub. So it's more robust and sturdy, but it involves more time and hence more cost for the customer to replace the brake rotor in this particular application.
And there we can see the front brakes. These are the installed components. The front rotors were pretty much as bad as the rears. Everything was just as rusty. But you can see the new rotors, the calipers. We replaced the brake hoses also, which were cracked and worn.
And brake hoses, that's an interesting thing to comment on. We used to do a lot of brake hoses in the past. We don't really do them too often anymore. The quality of them is much better than they used to be. But, you know, again, on this vehicle, there's just so much corrosion. I assume it's mostly from road salt, tends to wreck things and the hoses were worn as well.
Mark: So how did it get this bad?
Bernie: Well, I think just driving in salty roads, that to me, that's the only thing that's ever going to do it unless, you know, the vehicle has been dipped in salt water. But yeah, it's that, that's pretty much it. I mean, the kilometres are not that high on this vehicle, but 140,000 kilometres.
So it might well be that, you know, the history of it, it was driven in the wintertime and sat and it just accumulates over time. And if people aren't, you know, looking at it, having their brakes inspected, things get bad all of a sudden. And you keep driving, Oh the brakes are fine. Then all of a sudden they're grinding and realize they're not working very well. But up into that grinding point, you look at the amount of contact area of actual metal to brake pad is really very minimal. So you have to stop in a hurry or you're going down a long hill, you know, those brakes could be really dangerous.
Mark: Road salt is just a fact of life, how do you prevent it from getting on the underside of your vehicle or do something to lessen the risk of this taking place?
Bernie: Well, you can't obviously prevent the road salt from getting there, but what you can do is you can flush out your vehicle after wintertime or even during the winter, you can get a hose in there and spray your brakes out. It's easier to do on some vehicles than others, but, you know, getting under the vehicle and spraying everything out and even spraying the undercarriage of the vehicle is actually a really good thing. Some automatic car washes, and I don't think you could take a van this big through one, some of them actually spray underneath the vehicle too, which is a good thing to do.
Especially in winter, where if you drive anywhere, it's salty. And the other thing too, of course, if the vehicle is driven in salty conditions and then it's parked indoors and somewhere warm, that's a really bad environment. That'll really cause the salt to get in there and start eating at things.
Mark: Heat accelerates any kind of chemical reaction.
Bernie: That it does, and road salt eating steel is a chemical reaction.
Mark: So there you go. If you're looking for service for your Transit van or any Ford product in Vancouver, the guys to see are Pawlik Automotive. You can book online at pawlikautomotive.com, or you can call them at (604) 327-7112 to book your appointment. You have to call and book ahead. They're always busy. Pawlik Automotive, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Thanks so much for watching and listening. Thanks Bernie.
Bernie: Thank you, Mark. And thanks for watching.
