Today was my day off but the Jag has been in the shop since last week. Apparently, the parts supplier kept bringing the wrong part and today was going to be his third attempt to supply a rear brake caliper for my 1990 Jaguar Sovereign. Not wanting to waste more time if he was wrong again, I spent a few hours inspecting and pulling the rear caliper from my parts car.
The most difficult part of the job was jacking up the car. Here’s why. When I had the rear shocks/springs swapped over from the parts car, the bad ones were not re-installed on the parts car. So, the whole back end sits very low to the ground. This doesn’t help when you want to get a hydraulic jack under the jacking point. In fact, it was impossible being that the car was sitting so low. So, I rolled the jack to the midpoint of the car before finding enough clearance. I eventually jacked it up enough to get a jack stand under the car and then jacked it up closer to the wheel and placed another jack stand under the spring platform (where the spring used to sit).
I have done plenty of brake jobs so removing the caliper shouldn’t have been very difficult. But the Haynes manual must have had pictures from an earlier model because the pictures showed two wrenches being involved in pulling the guide pins. On mine, the pins were removed with a T45 Torx bit. I guess things may have changed from year to year. In any case, the caliper was quite rusty on the outside and it took some extra persuasion to pry loose from the rotor. Thankfully, the pads were in very good condition and seem to be useable in case they are needed in the future.
After putting my tools away, I got into the minivan to drive the parts to my mechanic. The first thing that I noticed was that it was starting to rain. My first thought was, “Thank you, Lord, for holding back the rain the entire time I was working on the car.” It’s good to notice the small things He does on a regular basis. And, although the new caliper did arrive today and was installed by my mechanic, I still appreciated the opportunity to do some backyard maintenance and to do it without getting wet!