MOT day

I'd done everything I thought I could to prepare the Stylus for its MOT. However, handing the car over to the tester, I was still feeling a bit unsure about what the outcome would be.

When the results came back, it was a fail. Surprisingly, it was not as bad as I had feared.

The Fail Sheet:

• Stop lamps not working: This was a slightly embarrassing minor issue. I had simply forgotten to plug the connector back in after tidying up the rear wiring!

• Rear brake efficiency and imbalance: This was the main hurdle. The handbrake and rear brake efficiency were both recorded at less than 50%, and the rear brakes were imbalanced across the axle.

The Rear Brake Remedy 

I had already completely rebuilt the front calipers and repainted the rear drums. On my initial inspection during the build, the rear brake internals looked absolutely brand new. The pads and all the mechanical components were clean and shiny, so I had decided not to bother rebuilding or changing anything inside the drums.

It turns out that was a slight oversight. Driving the car revealed that the handbrake was really poor and was not holding very well at all.

I took the rear brakes to bits again. I then thoroughly scuffed up the inside of the drums and knocked any shiny glaze off the surface of the pads. The rear brakes have an auto-adjuster, but I decided not to rely on it doing its own thing. Instead, I took the time to manually click the adjuster out one notch at a time until I physically could not get the drum back on. I then knocked it back just one single click so it was perfectly and tightly adjusted.

The Retest

This manual tweaking seemed to do the exact trick. I took the car back for its retest on the 12th of August, and it passed with flying colours and absolutely no advisories!

Annoyingly, the tester had keyed in the wrong milage on the first test, but he did correct it on the retest.