00 1.8 petrol Exhaust Heat Shield & Hand Brake - kesher
I need to remove the exhaust heat shield which is held in place by "special nuts or... bolts" according to the Haynes manual I have.

How do I undo these special nuts/bolts? They look like rivets to me.

Also

I recently took my Focus for its M.O.T here in the UK. It failed on one of the checks only:

When the handbrake is applied, it applies only 11% percent pull on the rear right hand wheel. 11% is below the legal minimum requirement.

In other words the parking brake for the right handside rear wheel has a "low effort".


The parking brake effort for the rear left hand wheel is fine.

THANKS

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
How about adding the year/engine info,
Like we have asked you to do!
PU

Edited by Pugugly on 30/03/2008 at 09:29

Exhaust Heat Shield & Hand Brake - kesher
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Here is the year/engine info for you:


Year 2000; Engine size 1.8 Zetec
Exhaust Heat Shield & Hand Brake - mikej
The heat shield on my 1999 1.8i is held on by these strange hexagonal grips/bolts. The bolts are not screwed on but pushed on and the inner surface grips onto the ribbed pin or screw that sticks out from the bodywork.

Despite the fact that they're not technically screwed on, I found that unscrewing them (either by hand or with a wrench) seemed to be the best way to loosen them. Wear thick gloves though, as the metalwork is pretty sharp in places !

My heat shield was coming away and rattling, so I removed the bolts, placed larger washers over the pins and pushed the bolts back on to hold everything in place.

Good luck getting the heat shield off without removing the exhaust - you're probably going to have to cut/destroy certain parts of it to get it off I would have thought and you'll struggle to replace certain parts too, unless you're able to at least lower the exhaust to make room.