‘He could have lost his front brake altogether if the pads had dropped out’
Mechanic Neil Sawbridge reckons this XR125 owner had a very lucky escape
‘He had a charging problem and the exhaust fell apart’
Ah, the joy of a cheap runaround, a bike to take you through the winter commute for little financial pain. At least that was one man’s plan when he acquired a 2003 Honda XR125. But the older the bike, the more experienced you need to be picking out problems, and this chap was an innocent abroad.
“He’d only had the thing for two months, and in that time he had a charging problem and the exhaust had fallen apart. He had no idea bless him, so when his front brake wouldn’t bite he brought it into us,” said experienced Doncaster Motorcycles mechanic Neil Sawbridge.
“He was saying there was no pressure in the front brake. These bikes use a simple sliding caliper with two pistons on one side, so we thought we could bleed it in seconds, but got no joy, so we unbolted the caliper for a closer look.”
What the guys found was a mess. One piston had seized solid and the other was barely moving, but the real horror was the pin that held the pads in place. It had seized in the caliper body some time before and a previous butcher had tried to drill it out but he had given up halfway. But then their butcher’s logic came up with the ideal solution, ‘let’s cut the old pads out and cut up the new ones to fit!’ “How they hadn’t dropped down and out of the caliper I’ll never know,” Neil said. “When it was new and the caliper pistons were fully in, the outside pad must have been really close to coming off the end of that pin. If that had happened he would have lost all his front brake as the caliper pistons would have been pushing fresh air until they started grinding into the disc.”
That pin had been so badly damaged that it was more costeffective to replace the whole caliper with a used one in decent nick, and in the end Neil was able to hunt one down for about £20, fit and bleed it, check the rest of the bike over and send the relieved owner on his way for £150.