Well, if you've read my post in the General Forum, you know my baby is going to be attempting to impress my lady friend. Well, my brakes are a little funky. But, they never fail, everything works.. just takes a special foot. When cold, or upon initial hard brake the pedal freezes, and the brakes don't work [scary if you haven't had this happen before, trust me, the first time it happend I just about sh*t my pants!], but if you let go and press the pedal again, all is well. When taking your time to stop a long distance with light pedal use [doesn't happen with a heavy foot] the ABS kicks in, the pedal vibrates like crazy [but the car stops fine]. Depressing, and repressing the pedal doesn't help, but this is intermittant, and sometimes does, and sometimes doesn't happen. The pads are 6-12 months at the most old, the rotors and calipers are 4 years old, and the fluid was last flushed 4 years ago [new fluid may have been added, or the brakes bled, I cannot confirm this]. The rest of the brake equipment is original to the car. So 15 years or so old. I don't like screwing around with brakes, and I am afraid this could become worse, and I may not have brakes! which woudn't be good.


-justin

I hope it'* not ABS sensors

That does sound like a Teves ABS with confused wheel sensors. Any error codes (either a-g or a-h on the ALDL and count the flashes. All codes are two digits.) ?

No codes, no lights.. nothing. Only thing I did to the brakes is when I removed the dash, I had to remove the ABS controller, and the car was driven once without that sucker, but has been driven many times after that.


-justin

Very similar description of what mine felt like too. I used padgett'* method of pulling codes for diagnostics. I got some rather strange results (I'm not sure I was reading the blinks correctly) but I think one of the codes meant "3 or more sensors bad". I've only had the ABS controller fuse in for the first day I started driving the car. Ever since then it'* been yanked out.

does the ABS light come on at all for you? If not, that sounds like a damn good idea for me.


-justin

When the fuse is pulled the ABS light is on. I reinstalled the bulb in order to do the diagonistics and decided to leave it in as I'm trying to sell it. I want potential buyers to know that it is disconnected.

Just pull the bulb if you decide to disable the ABS.

Better yet, unplug the sensor going to the bulb, that way when the car has its initial turn on, the bulb comes on as normal . Hell, i'm too lazy to do that. I wonder if its because she sits.. So much crap breaks with sitting.. doing nothing. I need to try to pull the codes, I just now understood padgett'* method of pulling codes. As you know Michigan gets snow.. [pretty obvious], and although this year, she won't be seeing a drop of that snow, next year, and hopefully many after, she will be seeing snow, will not having ABS negativly affect my braking? If so, is it enough to drop the cash to get new ABS sensors?


-justin

It certainly hasn't had any negitive effects for me. Personally, I'm not a big fan of ABS. Especially the bizzare one we have in our cars.

If I'm not mistaken, the parts you have to replace are hubs and axles, not just sensors. sse1990 described replacing one of the front axles to fix a front sensor problem and the whole hubs need to be replaced if it is a rear sensor problem. This should be confirmed by someone else though.

I was just wondering what would be the benefit of not having the ABS?