Isuzu Trooper Owners Club UK™

[bigbaldbloke]

Sorry to bore, but a further update & 3 questions. The Beast is back home now & I'm £105 worse off.

I asked the garage manager about testing the brake master cylinder & he said that you should keep pushing the pedal until it goes dead, then, with foot still on, start the engine & the pedal should go down. I tried it & it worked fine. Is this as effective as the above method?

Also, he said that the pads were 75% worn. Is that normal for 7 months of mostly driving around town in an auto?

Lastly, he reckons that the grating sound & feel that I got just before impact was the ABS kicking in. Bullsh*t or truth?


bbb
_________________
1995 Vauxhall Monterey
3.2 V6 Auto

[Google]

[Philp]

Brake wear is very subjective a lot depends on your driving style, the pad compound, mileage and type of driving (town vs motorway), autos tend to get through brakes quicker than a manual as you get less engine braking with the self-shifter. Also a Trooper is a big heavy motor and so will get through brakes quicker than a car if driven in a "spirited" manner! Town driving is heavier on brakes than motorway/A road driving as you tend to be on and off the brakes much more. I'd say thats probably fairly realistic tbh.

The first car I drove with ABS scared the *beep* out of me the first time it cut in, some systems can feel very harsh and you do get a fair amount of feedback through the pedal and some noise. The roads recently have been very greasy, apparently this is due to a semi-synthetic grit/salt mix some councils now use, a side effect of this is that it brings some oil out of the road surface making them very greasy.
_________________
Phil

96 or is it a 98 Isuzu Bighorn Lotus

[bigbaldbloke]

[Philp]

TBH I thought that the test described tested the brake servo performance not the master cylinder, master cylinders are very difficult to test, some have a dust seal on the end around the pushrod you can look under and see if theres any fluid getting past the seals but even this needs a certain amount of dismantling. Master cylinder faults tend to give you a mushy pedal that may or may not respond to pumping. Servo faults tend to give a hard pedal. There are other causes of brake problems of course, it could be a sticking caliper, (quite poassible if your tooiper has the same type of single pot calipers as the MK 1 as they are prone to corrosion) it could be a flexi-hose collapsing or ballooning or even a kinked hard brake line. Bias valves can stick as can load compensators if they are fitted to later troopers. (This is a device that adds more braking effort to the back end when loaded involving a lever on the rear axle that moves a valve) Mine occasionally sticks after being loaded which makes the back end lock up more readily, a good squirt of oil sorts it out generally)
_________________
Phil

96 or is it a 98 Isuzu Bighorn Lotus