Truck brakes

Very few things annoy me more than having something fixed that then doesn't stay fixed. Normal wear is one thing, but this is way beyond normal.

It turns out that the 2001 Dakota needs brakes (again). I guess the trailer must really eat through the brakes or something. I'm going to upgrade the parts to better quality this time and see if maybe they'll stay fixed for a change.

We just had these replaced not too long ago (two years, max) by Speedy Muffler. The particularly annoying thing is that they've been pulsing for a while, and I've asked Speedy to inspect the brakes twice in the last year, most recently at the end of April. They always tell me "oh, yeah, everything's fine, the rear is a bit out of round which causes the pulsing, but there's nothing to worry about."

Well, it's been getting worse, so Norah went back over on Tuesday morning and asked them to check it out again just to be sure we'll be okay for taking the trailer down to Jon's at the end of July. Nope. It's not okay at all. They told her that the pads had totally self destructed and eaten the rotors, and that she shouldn't put it back on the road until they could replace everything. So she called me, and I got on the phone to ask what they were talking about. (Oh, a man, that's different.) Well, um, the reality is that a couple of small pieces have cracked off the pads, and they're scoring some lines in the surface of the rotors. They assured me that it would be safe for another week or so, and gave Norah an estimate to have the work done for about $590.

Now, I already have a set of PowerSlot rotors sitting down at Jon's. And I found brand new pads on the net for about a third of what Speedy wants. And if we head down to Jon's and do the work down there, it cuts another half the price off due to their inflated labor charges.

It's just so annoying to get ambushed by these idiots. I asked why, when I asked them to look at this specific problem back in April, they found nothing, but today it's gone way beyond the point where it should have been replaced. Can things possibly self destruct in two months? Were your technicians totally incompetent back in April? And if so, why would I trust them to do the work now? Or are you trying to scam me, by allowing a small cheap job to go unrepaired until it gets to the point where it becomes a large expensive job?

The manager didn't have an answer for that. All he could say was "gee, that's odd."

Jon assures me that disc brakes aren't very difficult. I remember helping my Dad with drum brakes on the Jeep, and those were indeed very difficult. So hopefully this will go much smoother than that ever did. We'll see :-).