Badly-fitted brake caliper could have caused disaster
Honda tech Stuart McIntosh diagnosed something nasty in a bike health check
Stuart McIntosh is the Head Technician at Ecosse Honda in Aberdeen and has been in the bike industry for over 40 years so he’s seen a few sights. But he wasn’t expecting any issues with a 2014 Blade that came in for a service recently. “It’s standard Honda servicing policy to give every bike that comes in a ‘Health Check’, which is a visual inspection, so the customer is in the loop and doesn’t get any unpleasant surprises,” said Stuart. But it was Stuart who got the surprise when he scanned the
‘The caliper could have rotated and jammed into the rear wheel’
rear end of the Repsol replica, because the brake line was pulled tight and the caliper itself was at an acute angle. “The guy had changed his own rear tyre to save a few pennies. But when he slid the rear wheel assembly back into position he hadn’t lined up the caliper mounting correctly with a slot on the inside of the swingarm, leaving it pivoted up as if the brake was doing a wheelie,” Stuart continued. “He’d only ridden it a few miles into our workshop and when the guy used the back brake, the torqued-up spindle had been enough to hold it in place. But if he had stamped on the back brake it could have got very messy. As the pads bit into the disc the caliper would have rotated forwards and slammed into the swingarm.”
At the very least, that would have marked the £700 swingarm, but a heavier impact like that could have broken the mounting and who knows where the caliper would have ended up, maybe dangling in the breeze, but more likely wedged in the rear wheel.
“His ‘economy drive’ could have caused a grand’s worth of damage, and that’s if it didn’t throw him off his bike,” Stuart added. “That’s why whenever you dismantle an assembly on a bike for the first time bike it’s well worth taking some photos before you start, so you’ve got a record of the relative position of components.”