Monday, November 07, 2005


When reversing on Thursday leaving work there was a nasty scraping sound. When I tried to pull the hand brake on I discovered it came up much more than normal and had stopped working.
I decided to continue on my way home and fix it the next day in daylight before going to work.
The next morning I jacked up the OS rear wheel and removed the wheel, however when I removed the brake drum several bits of mashed up mechanism fell out. I realised I couldn't fix it in 10 minutes so I left it and borrowed my wife's car for work.
At work, in a panic, I phoned around for a replacement mechanism.
On Monday I had a day off so I decided to fit an Ah meter to the charger so that I could see the number of Ah (Amp hours) delivered to the battery.
On Tuesday the brake parts arrived and were very rusty and did not fit. I spent half a day thinking of ways to repair the self adjuster mechanism before realising the answer: Fix the adjuster with epoxy glue to make it manual adjustment. I adjusted the brake and refitted the drum and wheel, In fact I had the entire week as holiday so the following Monday I set off for work. The battery voltage seemed lower than normal after a few miles but this could be the dropping temperature as we approach winter.
All seemed well that day but on the run home I'm sure I could smell boiling acid!