Peugeot 405 brake bleeding

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Mon 23 Aug 2004 23:38
Peugeot 405 brake bleeding - allan doc
I tried to bleed my brakes on my pug 405, but when i tried to loosen the nipple in the front caliper, the nipple just snapped. I don\'t want to try the other side incase i do the same again. I tried to loosen the nipple by the usual fashion of unscrewing anti-clockwise. Does anyone know if you unscrew these anti-clock wise or clockwise, or if someone could give any tips on how to loosen these. Many Thanks
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Tue 24 Aug 2004 13:42
Peugeot 405 brake bleeding - RichardW
Allan,

Brake bleed nipples are very prone to breaking off on older cars - the hole in the middle makes them very weak, a bit of rust, and snap they go. You need to douse them in penetrating fluid first for a few days (use Plus Gas or similar - it's better than WD-40) then apply some heat to the bleed nipple (blowlamp or similar), then cool it with the pentrating fluid (carefully as it's flammable!), then heat it again, and cool it. Give it a few sharp taps square on the end with a copper hammer (or use a block of wood) and now carefully try and unscrew it (yes, anticlockwise). If it doesn't come easily then, back to heating a cooling a couple more times. It might come out, or it might just laugh at you and break off anyway! I have just had to do this on the rear brakes on my Xantia, and was lucky that after some careful persuading I got both nipples undone. Use a good quality ring spanner as well, rather than an open ended spanner - which will tend to slip off and partially round the nut, making it even more difficult to get out.

The snapped one will have to be drilled out, the hole retapped, and a new nipple inserted. It MIGHT come out with a stud extractor, but you are likely just to break this off, which leaves you with a very hard extractor in a soft stud that will be almost impossible to remove. I expect you will need to remove the caliper and take it to an engineering shop to get this done.


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RichardW

Is it illogical? It must be Citroen....
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Sun 29 Aug 2004 13:35
Peugeot 405 brake bleeding - DL
It's a common problem on Bendix braked Peugeots.

Replaceing the caliper with a recon unit for GSF is often the best answer. Not expensive either.

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