1202 ALARM

I put the caliper back on the car, bled it and pumped like mad and eventually the piston came loose. Back on the bench the problem turned out to be rust around the lip on the caliper casting where the piston fits. The piston had a little surface corrosion, but this cleaned off with wire wool and some 4000 grade wet-and-dry. I took a cone grinder fitted to my Minicraft drill to the lip on the casting and lo-and-behold the piston was sliding freely in and out again. The only problem was the replacement dirt gaiter which no amount of pressing and poking would convince to stay firmly down on the caliper. Investigation showed this to be due to more corrosion which I did my best to clean up. The caliper is now back on the car, bled and working as it should. It isn't perfect, but it will be fine while I scope eBay for a replacement.

The front nearside brake caliper has been sticking for a while.  It took a month to get a reconditioning kit from Renault, but taking the caliper off takes 5 minutes. Problem is getting the piston out. I've tried 3 different bodge methods to no avail, but putting the caliper back on the car and pumping the brakes came closest, so I'm going to try that again tomorrow. After that hopefully a good clean with fine wet & dry emery and fit the new seals and I'll get another few months out of it.

Mike on Freegle kindly gave me this neat little LCD TV he'd finished with. Now that analogue broadcasts have stopped and 4G seems to be the future for watching TV, these old sets are obsolete, but this one has an A/V input so it can be used as a dinky monitor. It's a bit small for raw Raspberry Pi, but I want to try it with the Arduino TV-out library to see what that could do. If I ever got the hang of GUI coding it might be possible to make something with big buttons.