Them's the brakes..

For those of you who may not be familiar with Utard's automotive laws, the rule is that you must get your car inspected every other year before you can re-register it. Mostly it is just an opportunity for the state to suck more money out of your pocket and another excuse for repair shops to make up reasons that you need to finance their boat payments.(By the way, have you heard about the Jiffy Lube scam?) So, at the end of August when my Cadillac was due for it's tags, I took it to get inspected. Lo and behold, they said it needed brand new brake pads and the brake hoses had some cracks in them! It would cost about $220 for them to fix it and I said, "Don't be ridiculous!"  (well, I wish I had said that.)

I went to the parts store and got a set of lifetime warranty brake pads for under $20 and the hoses for a grand total of $54 and change.  MUCH better than $220, don't you think? My brother-in-law Justin said that he could help me put them on on Friday afternoon (last Friday).  We got too busy to do it that night, so we rescheduled for Monday morning, Labor Day. I was willing to sacrifice my only 'sleep-in' day to be able to get them done and over with, so I agreed to be there at 8. We got it up in the air, the wheels off, took a look at the caliper thing, and said, "huhh..." Wouldn't you know it took a special tool to release the caliper from the hub???!!! More importantly, a tool neither Justin or I had in our possession. So we ran to the farm store in town and got what we thought was the right size socket- the largest size they had of that type in stock. We got back, climbed under the car, and . . .still too small! That meant we had to go to the big dogs and try a real live auto parts store all the way back in Logan!

OK, so we go to Checker's to get the right size tool. We ended up purchasing two different sized sockets just in case and headed back home. The largest sized one worked and we finally got the brakes off after having the car in the air for two hours! Upon opening the boxes of new brake pads, we noticed something. Something we really could have lived without seeing. (No, the box didn't have those springy snakes in it!) They were the wrong brake pads! No amount of fandangling would have ever gotten those things to fit on where the old ones were; not that you would want to mess with anything in that system, anyway.  Luckily, we checked the hoses too before we went BACK to town again- yeah, they were wrong. We took everything back and made quadrupley sure everything was right before we went home again. We were now three hours into a 1/2 hour project!!

Once we got home for the last time, we got the brake pads on and everything done in about 20 minutes. good grief!


Wouldn't it be nice if the story ended there and we all lived happily ever after???


 Well, on the way home from the Hansens, I was at a stoplight and a silver toyota pickup pulled up behind me with cop lights flashing behind the grill. A dude in shorts and a t-shirt came out and told me I had cut off another vehicle. When he asked for my registration I couldn't find it at all. I also couldn't find the proof of insurance. There was nothing in the glove box, nothing under the seats, nothing anywhere! I knew I had had it a few days earlier because I needed it in order to get inspected in the first place! But now, when I needed it most, it was invisible! I was able to call Debbie to have her bring the extra insurance cards from home, so that wouldn't be on the ticket, but there wasn't anything we could do about the registration at that moment. They ended up towing my poor car away, which put quite a damper on the rest of the holiday.

Next week I have to make an appointment to go to court with all the documents and everything to prove to them the only reason I was driving the car was to get it fixed so it COULD be registered!!! Hopefully the judge will have pity on little ol' me...

I'll let you know how it goes.