Aborted Mod

I had 3-1/2 hours free this morning after we returned from the store, so I decided the time had come to paint the brake calipers. I loosened the lug nuts on all four wheels a half turn and put the car on jack stands. I pulled the right side wheels off and when I started on the back left there was one lug nut that required a lot of force to back off. I quit after a half turn knowing just what that meant, stripped or cross threaded lug nut. It felt just like the last time back in April. So much for painting calipers.

What the heck, I thought, I’ll do the passenger side this morning and do the other side at another time. I removed the bolts holding the right front caliper on and lifted it off. Sprayed it real good with brake cleaner, so the paint would adhere to it and rested it on top of the rotor. I then went in search of something to hold it or hang it from while I sprayed it. First I was going to paint it with some silver I had as an undercoat before hitting it with my Garnet Red in a can. Couldn’t find the old coat hanger I thought I had in the garage, so I went back to the car to study my options some more. The more I looked, the more I thought it would be hard to mask all the spots I needed to and make it easy to paint without getting overspray on places I didn’t want to. I relubed the slider pins and put the brakes back together.

Because I had the wheel off in back I lubed those slide pins too before mounting the wheels back on the car. I used some of my recently purchase anti-size compound on the lug nuts as a good measure. For the heck of it, I also put some anti-seize on the left front lug nuts before putting it back on the car. That left me with the left rear and it’s stuck lug nut. I tightened the other three down and slowly backed off the offending nut. Maybe because the car was a little cooler or the other nuts being tight, but I could slowly back it off the stud. When I looked inside the nut I could see that it was very mangled. The stud had a few misplaced grooves but otherwise it looked OK. I put the anti-seize on all of them and carefully tightened up that scarred nut on the scarred stud.

I have zero proof that this is what happened, but from recent experience it certainly seems likely. The knucklehead who changed out my previous stripped stud decided he didn’t want to put a half mangled lug nut on his nice new stud, so he walked around the back of the car, removed a random lug nut off the left rear wheel and using his impact wrench force fed the bad nut on hoping that would re-form the threads. Instead he just created another problem as I am going to have to have the one on the left replaced, plus it might be a good idea to get a new lug nut. You can bet that even though they should do the work for free at the LTS, I’m going to cut my loses and go somewhere else and pay to have it done.

I haven’t given up entirely on painting the calipers yet either. I think instead of the exact match thing I will go get a small can of the liquid Rustoleum in maroon and use that. I had a real good experience with that stuff when I did my old Laguna Blue’s calipers in yellow.