My friend's 1994 Honda Civic Del Sol is having a serious braking problem. He says he was driving down the road and he heard a grinding sound every time he hit the brakes. suddenly he heard a metal pinging sound and he lost almost all braking power and pulled into a shopping center.

we just replaced both front calipers (the rears are drums, if that matters) with ones from my wrecked del sol that worked fine before the accident. we tried bleeding them but there's nothing coming out, even after refilling the reservoir with brake fluid.

i believe there's something wrong with the master cylinder, because it doesn't look like any fluid's being pumped into the calipers. i have a working master cylinder in my car but we don't want to install it if that's not the problem, hence why i'm posting here.

also, whenever he hits the brakes, we hear a click come from the general area of the shift ****, but we have no idea what that might be. the brake light isn't on. the srs light is on, but it always was so who knows.

any suggestions? and if you think it is the master cylinder, could you link me to a decent master cylinder installation guide, preferably with pictures? thanks a lot.

 

http://www.2carpros.com/how_to/brake...r_cylinder.htm

 

Ok, we just replaced the master cylinder, refilled it with fluid, and now he's got no brakes at all... everytime he pumps the brakes there's a hissing sound the comes from behind the cylinder, it did it with both cylinders. i don
t recall any of my cars ever making that sound but it could be normal. it seems like this problem is something deeper. any ideas?

 

and its not leaking fluid? brake booster good?

 

the clicking noise that you are hearing when u step on the brakes is ur either auto trans. =the neutral safety switch or if a manual trans. =clutch safety switch in which since it is clicking that normal operation for it and the switch is there for that you wont be able to start ur car in an auto trans. =if its not in park or neutral and in a manual =if the clutch pedal is NOt depressed.

So try this to check the operation of ur brake booster= pump your brakes with the car off and it should build up pressure and then stop when the pedal feels firm and when it does feel "firm" lol start the car while holding the brake pedal, and the pedal should fall lower to the floor = if it does ur booster is good

and when u installed the master cylinder did u "bench bleed it off the car" and afterwards while it was on the car?

if anything my best bet is your proportioning valve is restricted/bad because you said no fluid is comming out of the calipers nor the rear drum wheel cylinders correct? so check everything out and ur welcome as i'm not on this website alot...

 

Ok, I think I have a good understanding of what the problem is. It looks like we're morons and basically filled the entire system with air. we're going to bleed the entire system when we get off work. in the mean time, we found something interesting while replacing the front driver-side caliper.

The caliper was completely seized, and missing the pad on the outside of the rotor. the rotor was scarred beyond belief, i'm attaching a picture because it's actually kind of funny. Anyway, we replaced the entire caliper, pins, everything with the working ones off my car. unfortunately we couldn't replace the rotor because i don't have the tools to remove it.

this is meant to be a quick fix, not permanent, my friend is low on cash so somewhat working brakes for the time being is all we need. until he get's a couple hundred to take it to a shop.

so, i believe the grinding, then metal pinging sound he heard was that outer pad scraping against the rotor to the point it heated up so much that it shattered and fell out. i didn't know this was possible, but it seems logical, maybe it isn't, i don't know.

so, that's where we're at. i'll update the situation after we bleed the brakes.

 

Sure enough, bleeding the brakes did the trick! Thanks everyone!

 

been looking, for the solution to this problem, and since my car had an automatic transmission (so what im hearing all along is the Neutral Safety Switch)...

so bleeding the brakes is the main solution to this...