Date:         Mon, 2 Sep 2019 17:48:47 -0700
Reply-To:     Alistair Bell <albell@SHAW.CA>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Alistair Bell <albell@SHAW.CA>
Subject:      Brake fade on trip
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Last week took a short trip, to a couple of places we often go to here n southern Vancouver island. Was the first trip with the new cheapo tire pressure monitoring kit I posted about a while back. 

So of course I’m glued to the screen on the Hwy part of the trip. The temp sensor being in the valve stem cap ain’t a really good way of observing tire temps. It’s great if you want to see what side of the an has been in the sun though.

:-)

The air flow over the valve stem cap, at speed, keeps the sensor close to ambient. I couldn’t see any temp changes at Hwy speeds even on steepish declines and hard braking .

So we got to one of our fav spots. The road was as bad as I’ve seen it. It’s single track logging spur, parts of the road becomes a creek during rain. Last 5 km of it is steep, as steep as you get on logging roads ( think of the loaded trucks coming down. Honestly, some parts are so steep and narrow, and tight turns, I can’t believe anything longer than an f250 can make it ).

It’s g gear for us, and the front wheels are grabbing. Second day, late afternoon the weather was changing and the wind coming up strongish. We decided to head to another spot, lower and less windy.

Coming back down the road I was in first, but the roughness of the road had me riding the brakes a lot.

Then the pedal got soft and I had less than sufficient brake. Got it into g gear and got the hand brake on once in a while. The temp sensors showed 34 front right , 30 front left, and 16 on both rear ( Celsius ) . I’m thinking the values are a good reflection of the wheel temps as we were going slow, no movement on speedo slow.

On the level, the brakes came back. The front temps dropped.

Brakes fine on Hwy travel back home.

This event is what made me flush the brakes yesterday. And change that old front near side flex line.

I’m hypothesizing that the front right brake was doing more work than the front left, thinking the front left flex line was bulging. 

Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it :-)

Alistair