I took my car to have the front brake pads changed today and was called to say that one of the caliper bolts has been stripped the last time the pads where changed.

They were changed 6 months ago by my ex girlfriends brothers garage.

The garage i took my car too have worked on it for years and i believe if they had caused the damaged themselves they would own up to it and fix it. They changed the pads and discs before i let my ex's brother carry out the work last summer.

im just after some opinions if it is possible to drive with a stripped caliper bolt for 6 months and not notice?

thanks in advance

you are getting thru pads every 6mts!

Why would the calipers have been removed simply to change the pads? Unless things have changed dramatically nowadays, I never had to remove the calipers unless I've been changing the discs.

Anyway, the answer to your question – is it possible to drive? The answer has to be No. Maybe you have been driving like that for some time but now you know about it, if there was any kind of failure and in particular if somebody was injured the police would find it and eventually the garage would be contacted and they would say that they had informed you about it.

Apart from the risk of injury to somebody else or to yourself, I think you would be in very serious trouble.

… I've just we read your question I now understand you are really asking whether you might have been driving like that previously and not have noticed. I suppose that the answer is that nobody would notice – until the catastrophic failure

thanks guys ...

i do 24k miles a year getting to work etc.

think you got the wrong end of the stick with my question but got there in the end.

Surely the mechanic who changed them in the summer would have known when the bolts just kept spinning and not tightening?

what scares me the most in all of this is that the mechanic who caused the damage did not tell me and was ok with his sister and her infant son travelling in the car with me for many hundreds of miles.

what is the car?

if it has numerous calliper bolts then one might not be too serious though not nice

some can have 4 or more holding the halves together

if he used an air gun or battery driven device you can easily do it without realising.

Sorry BF, fully floatimg calipers are the norm now.

You are getting old.

H

Pray tell, what are fully floating calipers? Surely not these things where only one pad moves and the other is static, being hauled to the disc as the caliper swings.

Sounds as bad as my friend who has the troublesome KUGA---he now tells me the power steering is electric !!!!!!

The caliper does not 'swing', it floats.

Hydraulic PAS is so yesterday, the future is EPAS.

H

In that case Hammy the future looks increasingly bleak.

I am at a complete loss to understand what car / component designers have within the skull cavity---have any of them actually had to repair a vehicle or run a car on a limited budget????

In this area, local garages are kept busy with routine service items and MOT prep. Most Mot prep is on suspensions & brakes. They all say that mechanical failure in engines etc is on the wain but their referral of vehicle faults to the local sparkie is significantly increased----so why build in more electrics when they are so troublesome??

Well respected actress made a comment on TV last night viz: "Why does progress usually make things worse?".

On hearing this I immediately thought of the brakes on modern cars as compared to the excellent system on Volvo 240's in the 70's !!!!!