you don't need to, all you do is just push the piston in and see that it pops out again on its own, and of course check under the boots for fluid leaking. If the brake fluid is changed on schedule (every two or three years) then the chance of a seized cylinder is very low.
I thought it was the ten oclock test, due to the sort of clock face symbol they had on the MoT station sign.
OK. You buy a used car with a years MOT. To make it look tidy, the seller has fitted a new set of plates after the MOT. These are not to the required standard in any one of a number of trivial ways.
A year later, your carefully maintained car, with all its weekly checks done, fails the MOT.
I don't have a personal axe to grind here. I've not had one of my own cars fail an MOT for as long as I can remember. Certainly more than 25 years, although some of them have been too new to need one. I am very fussy about keeping my cars in a safe, well-maintained state.
Regardless of the care, or anyone else takes, I still take issue with your post:
"Any car should pass its MOT with no work if it's properly maintained."
If you had prefaced the sentence with "Almost", I would agree with you.
Chris
Fairy nuff. But if the vendor has fitted illegal plates what other nasties abound? The making of new plates is quite tightly controlled by law.
No expense spared on maintaining my old 75 - yet it is technically running illegal plates. Mind you, it passed the MOT with them on last year.....
Plates which don't conform to SPECS and ANPR standards don't mean the owner will have cut corners elsewhere.
If they're put on to tart up a vehicle to sell it?
I had to replace a plate on the other Micra because water ingress had changed the colour of one of the characters to just too pale a shade of grey.
Ian
Ten seconds and google will find you a host of companies which will make you "show plates" - not legal for road use, guv - in any design you can think of, and more which will do perfectly standard plates and post them to you from Gibraltar. And the tighter rules don't apply in Scotland, though most retailers apply them anyway.
Ian
you are going to the wrong MoT man, mine won't fail anything that is on there and still readable, I cannot remember having any fail since starting to use him some 15 years ago and bear in mind that I take in about 50 a year, that is a lot of passes. I sometimes think, that must fail, but no, it goes through.
Yes, there are a few MOT people around like that, and particularly popular with the used car trade. My chap is quite young, fairly recently qualified and punctilious without being nitpicking. I was impressed, for example, that, knowing I had changed a rear brake cylinder and pipework, he carefully examined it all, under pressure as well, for soundness. Sure, he could just have stuck it on the rollers, but the pipework is part of the test and so he checked the changed pipework.
As long as MOT testers know what they are doing - and Adrian will agree, I think, that on the matter of 2CV kingpin play many don't - I am perfectly happy for them to be meticulous.
Ian
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