My car has floating calipers. How easy should it be to slide them in and out? I need to apply a fair amount of force with both hands to move it (after unbolting the caliper from the hub).
I used to have one of the sliders seized; about 6 months ago I cleaned it and re-greased it with rubber grease and it seemed to slide OK. When I looked at it again yesterday it had seized again (so I repeated the procedure). Is this indicative of a bigger problem, or am I just not greasing it properly?
I tried jacking the front of the car up and spinning the front wheels to see if they were centred properly. While doing this, I noticed that on the wheel where I'd just had the caliper off (and had pushed back the piston), I could just spin it with a small amount of force and it would keep spinning for 30 seconds at least. But when I tried it again after doing some braking, the same amount of force won't even give it 1 full rotation. Is this normal?
To see if my wheel was on properly, I placed a stationary object adjacent to the rim (the corner of a small table in fact), and span the wheel and checked to see if the wheel rim stayed at the same location relative to the table corner. For about 300 degrees of rotation it was perfectly straight, but for the other 60 degrees the rim moved inwards by about
5mm and then out again. To verify this, I looked under the wheel, observing the distance between the tire and the floor. Again, for about 300 degrees of rotation the gap was constant, and then there was a small 'bubble' where it moved closer to the floor by about 2mm and then back out again.Does this indicate my wheel itself is buckled? I figure that if I had runout on my rotors, or if my wheel were not centred, then any mis-alignment would vary continuously around the whole 360 degrees, rather than just occuring at one point.
NB: There is some rubbing on my strut tower where the tyre has clearly been touching it. If I check with my finger when the car is on the ground (I have 2 deg camber), it is pretty close to touching, but on the other side of the car I can get my little finger in the gap. When I had the wheels the other way around, the problem followed the actual wheels (ie. the suspect wheel was still very close to the strut and the good wheel had the gap), which leads me to suspect that it is actually a problem with the wheel and not with the hub/rotor.
Regarding some things written in this article:
Also, I have quite a lot of rust on my wheel hub face (you can see the lumps of rust etc). I'd like to clean this off but I don't have an angle grinder or the special tool mentioned in that article. Can I just paint rustkiller on and then wirebrush/lightly sand it until it's quite flat?