About a year ago I replaced all the brake stuff on my current Tercel. I can't remember if the car came with new calipers or I bought them myself but anyway, they were new or remanufactured. I put them on and all seemed fine.
Then recently I was driving to work when the brake light came on and stayed on. I got to work and checked the brake fluid level, and was surprised to see it was low. I topped it up and the light turned off.
On my initial inspection I couldn't find the leak anywhere so I figured it was slow and I was probably ok to keep driving the car and just keep an eye on the brake fluid level. Eventually I noticed it had dropped some more so I took another look and finally found the culprit. The piston seal in one of the brake calipers must have been faulty or installed wrong, and was leaking. You can see it twisted up around about half of its edge.
I had never come across this before so I wanted to document it here and warn others to take a good look at the piston seals whenever you replace the calipers. This one was probably bad out of the box so if I had caught it before I installed it I could have had it replaced, but because it was so long ago and I don't even know where this one came from I'm SOL in that department. Luckily I had put all new brakes on my parts car before it was designated as such so I was able to just swap calipers with it. Live and learn.
failed brake caliper piston seal
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dlb
- Highest Ranking Member
- Posts: 7325
- Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2009 9:03 pm
- My tercel:: '87 sr5, '83 dlx parts car
- Location: bc, canada
failed brake caliper piston seal
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