I have early calipers. Having had a look at the late caliper (yeah, I got the wrong one first) they look to have a banjo fitting on the end of the flexi without the stupid short link pipe.
Apparently the rear caliper carrier bolts are XYZ heads and are a twit to deal with, so I'm glad I didn't have to change those as there is plenty of meat on the pads and the discs are in good nick.
New caliper on and stupid little pipe swapped over:
Here's the back of the new caliper - you can see the two Torx bolts that hold the motor on the caliper:
If you're in a position where you need to remove the handbrake mechanism these undo and the handbrake mech just pulls off.
According to various posts on here, the internal mechanism can then be wound off manually with a larger Torx bit, if it fails on (although the access would, no doubt be a twit):
Here's the attractive back of the caliper, with the electric motor etc pulled off it:
And here's the motor-holding part of the stupid embuggerance.
So, what you're supposed to do to work on the rear calipers is to first connect the bloody battery charger, which I did, of course. I even plugged in the laptop power supply, so that wouldn't go to sleep and forget it was doing something important and screw everything up.
Having done this, I then rummaged through VAG-COM and found the bit to hold the calipers off and executed that.
Nothing happened.
So, I figured they were already wound off because the handbrake had failed off, so I changed the caliper - normal pair of M8 bolts and bled the new one up. Then I went back into the area of VAG-COM and told it to test the functionality of the parking brake.
Nothing happened.
I then went in and looked at fault codes and it said
and I tried clearing it..... and it wouldn't... so I unplugged the caliper and put the pins to the multimeter and that was showing 0v when the button was pressed, or when the function was selected in VAG-COM. No volts suggesting anything was happening at all.02433 - Supply Voltage for Right Parking Brake Motor (V283)
012 - Electrical Fault in Circuit - MIL ON
Next up I unplugged the other caliper, and ran diagnostics.
Nope, just the same fault, on the right even when I kicked it to check for faults. So for sh*ts and giggles I pressed the button.... and the caliper whirred on and I thought 'oh great, now the sodding thing will be locked on', so I tried pressing the brake pedal and the button to release it.... and it released.
So I ran a full scan and it threw out a CAN gateway error
Any thoughts on this would be fabulous. At this point, I consulted The Oracle who told me to check the fuses, in case the caliper had taken out the fuse as it loaded up the volts and failed, taking out the fuse for the CAN gateway that controls the parking brake.1 Fault Found:
01044 - Control Module Incorrectly Coded
000 - -
I couldn't find any blown, although of the FOUR handbrake fuses, two should be 20A and one was 15A and one was 25A, so I swapped both of those for the correct ratings and swapped a bunch of the other fuses around to make sure there wasn't a hairline crack in one of them causing problems.
Interestingly one of the fuse numbers in the handbook has a pencilled star next to it... do we think someone else has had some fun here before?
Having had *some* success with poking about and it randomly changing from not working at all to working, but still showing the 'Parking Brake Fail' light on the dash AND the bloody bonging shutting up I took it for a drive... and that was fine, although the amber warning light still stayed on, so the car was brought back to the barn, had the battery disconnected and was left to sit on the naughty step for an hour, then I drove it for a short way to eliminate the steering systems light and the ESP light and I fault-code read it and got this....
The observant among you may notice a subtle difference to the original fault.02432 - Supply Voltage for Left Parking Brake Motor (V282)
011 - Open Circuit - MIL ON
Yup, the nearside caliper has come out in sympathy (yes, I really did remember to re-connect it after testing with it off).
But for now, the parking brake operates.... although the single yellow light is still on. At least I don't have The Three Amigos and their accompanying endless bonging and beeping.
At least I have a clear roadmap of the next job on the bloody thing and let's hope the new calipers will be good for another 140k.
The front discs and pads were an easy fit and the value had definitely been used up in those on the car. I do need to run fresh fluid through the whole thing soon, judging by the murk dwelling in the system at the moment.
Any thoughts and suggestions as to what to push and prod in the EPB system next to try and clear things down properly would be much appreciated.