OUR CLASSICS
A recent MoT advisory prompted JJ to give his Celica’s rear brakes – which he changed three years ago – another once over just to be sure...
1995 TOYOTA CELICA GT
I don’t know about you, but no matter how often I work on my old cars, I always feel a pang of anxiety just after completing any job. Even if it goes really smoothly, I travel the first few miles after said overhauls at a leisurely pace (contrary to my usual driving style).
The Celica is not only my first Toyota, it’s very nearly my first Japanese car full-stop – barring a Mazda MX-5 MkII that I owned for a single fleeting summer. That’s not to say that it’s overly complex or tricky to work on – quite the opposite in fact – it’s just that its engineering is still relatively new to me.
One of the aforementioned jobs was the renewal of some very tired rear brakes back in 2021. The stoppers have been performing as expected since then, notwithstanding a phantom noise from time to time that, frustratingly, always seemed to disappear whenever I tried to track it down. The discs never got hot, even after long high-speed motorway journeys, and the noise – which sounded like a pad just kissing a disc – has been inconsistent, offering nowhere near enough resistance to affect anything.
Or so I thought. With this in the back of my mind, and a renewal of an MoT test duly completed, an advisory for a slight rear brake imbalance confirmed that I hadn’t been hearing things. The tester reported a slight metallic sound and suggested that it might be the rear pads down to the metal, but I wasn’t convinced because they’ve covered fewer than 10k miles since they were changed. Nevertheless, I bought a new set of pads and looked for a break in the weather and my work schedule sufficiently long to set about re-visiting the Celica’s rear.
Jacking both wheels off the ground and spinning them revealed a slight drag on the nearside rear. With the wheel off and single pivot bolt released, the whole caliper hinges up and out of the way, allowing for an easy inspection or pad swap.
As I suspected the latter were in great shape and still showing near-new levels of friction material. With the pressure off the pads, however, the dragging noise had gone. Just to make sure that I hadn’t imagined the sound coming from the offside – or that there was
