Long Island homeowners have an expression that they live by; you better be rich or handy. Same can be said for owning an old Corvette.
My wife and I bought this car as a twentieth anniversary present to ourselves a couple of years ago. It's a great looking car that I was at first surprised to find my wife actually enjoyed driving. Matter of fact I was delighted. The price seemed about right although it was a little rough around the edges. What's an old car that's not a project car?
Everyone we know seems to love our car and look at it as part of our family. That's nice. However, our Little Red Corvette has been quite the challenge. The wife hasn't driven it in over a year finding it too crude for her tastes. She claims it really isn't even a real car. Up until I fixed the "always on heat" problem, our Sunday afternoon traipses along Lake Erie were only as long as we could stand the searing heat. The failure of the rear brakes was the latest in a series of problems that would have many people selling the car. The wife wants it gone. Now, I don't know how serious she is about that but our boys, who actually could car less about cars, will have none of that talk. So, she stays. Besides, I bellow, we'd take a bath on it.
The brake failure was sobering. They failed because what is referred to as the "cross over line", that carries brake fluid from the left side of the car to the right rear caliper, had a hole in it right there near the differential. Honestly, the brakes on this car have never been all that great so it's hard to say when they actually failed, though. I noticed that something was wrong around Thanksgiving when I moved the car out of the garage and the rear tires wouldn't stop rotating on a patch of ice despite my flooring of the brake pedal. I found the reservoir in the master cylinder was empty.
Nothing smells more expensive than a problem on a Corvette. More so than the leaky power steering where I refilled the power steering pump before every drive, with one half of the brakes not working, I've taken the Corvette off line completely until I either fixed the brakes or got them fixed. Knowing that this job would run at least a grand if not two, I hit the books. God Bless The Internet.
Despite some understandable frustrations, the process has been nothing short of exhilaratingly satisfying. The total cost of parts will run me, sans shipping, about $85. That includes fresh pads for these rear calipers.
I ain't rich.
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