Drivers side front line developed a slow leak. I believe it failed on a very spirited mountain run. I felt a momentary loss of braking, but pumped a few times and all was well.

I'm getting the lines replaced, but now the finish on my brembo caliper and track wheel are hosed. I know there are places that can refinish wheels, and my dealer is looking into the cost of that, but anyone ever heard of refinishing a caliper?

 

i would try to contact Brembo and see if they can refinish it for you. Eastwood sells caliper paint kit. but i doubt it can reproduce the orange color on brembo's.

 

And you sure it's the line that failed? Where did it fail, at the connection to the fitting, or somewhere in the middle of the line? Keep in mind that the slow failure is not necessarily a bad thing; for all you know it could have been caused by a rock or some object hitting the line and it might have caused total failure to a rubber line. You just never know. I have had Steel Lines on my cars for years with never a failure of any kind.

 

I don't know where the failure is yet. The car is still being repaired, and I havn't seen the damaged line yet. The mech said it was a machined fitting, but wasn't more specific. I intend to take pics and contact stoptech when I get the bad parts back. I'll post them here as well.

 

If the line failed and began to leak, you would not be able to regain pressure by pumping a few times. The pedal would go to the floor and you would not be able to regain system pressure. You can test for a leak by pressing the pedal firmly. If it slowly sinks to the floor, then you've got a leak somewhere or else a torn seal in your master cylinder.

I suspect there is something else going on here. Did you execute a series of hard left/right sweeping turns just before you noticed the pedal sink a bit? If so, then you've run into something called pad knockback. That's a characteristic of the Track model that some racers have begun to notice. The lateral bearing deflection causes the rotor to push the pad (and thus the piston) back and results in longer than normal pedal travel if you've done some hard turns without braking for a while.

I fired off an email message to Bob Lee at StopTech and I suggest you hook him up tomorrow with your mechanic so they can get to the bottom of this quickly. If it's not knock-back, then it is important to find the root cause.

You say everything returned to normal after a couple pedal pumps? That does NOT sound like a failed line.

 

Well, I just got back from my mech. The leak in the line occured at the drivers side front caliper connection. He felt that the machining was not quite right and that is what caused the leak. The first thing they checked was to be sure the fitting was on tight and that it wasn't an install problem. That was fine. The lines had been on for months with no problems. There is no visible problem with the line connection, but it did start to leak.

Dave, in answer to your question, I had been doing lots of right left cornering, but always with braking. The glitch occured ater a straight away as I was hard braking for the turn at the end. I noticed what I thought was road grime on my rim after that run, and cleaned it off. I didn't realize it was brake fluid until I looked at the rim again a few days later and noticed the fluid had returned. I knew it was brake fluid because it was bubbling the paint on the rim. I'lll see if I can contact Bob via e-mail and fill him in on the details.

 

Yup, I get knockback all the time. It takes me a few laps at a track to just realize where it's going to happen and I just give the brake a quick warm up pump to close the gap. It's always very consistant. You start to do it subconsciously after a while. Sure doesn't help HT downshifting though.