Well I had a very annoying weekend, and now you all have to hear about it (unless of course you stop reading or skip ahead).
thursday morning after two stops the car starts to pull hard left durring braking and the car became hard to stop. checked the fluid, master cylinder and lines for leaks, nothing. so i leave work early only to have it get worse on the ride home. as a result i was forced to take friday off to investigate.
friday i had remembered that while doing my brake upgrade with adam one of my passenger front caliper slide pins had seized and was not applying force properly. i had of course intended to fix this but being me, i forgot about it. so i went and ordered one froma dealershit for 75 bucks and expected arrival time of saturday morning.
saturday morning comes around and no part, the douchbags forgot to place the order and it would be in till....today. so i decided to try to un seize it my self at my buddy herbs place. got it un seized and working but still no brakes. poped off the brake hose and no fluid, poped off the hard line and no fluid, poped off the ABS black and no fluid. bench tested the master cylinder and decided it might be that or the proportining valve after consulting adam and a couple others. bought a remanned master cylinder and poped it on.
sunday we went to bleed the brakes and test everything...still no fluid to the right front
. then we were un able to get any fluid to the rest of the brakes
. figuing it was a bad reman, we poped it off to replace the old one and what do we find...foil blocking one of the valves in the bottom of the resivoir
...the same foil used under the caps of very fimiliar brake fluid bottles. so we got the brakes bled and STILL not fluid to the right front
. figured out it must be the ABS actuator which almost never fails in this way.
heres where it got fun in case you want to skip ahead, a new ABS block costs anwhere between 1400 and 1800 bucks, of course, this ment no more camry for me. so i took a long shot and went to a local junkyard and found one...and two...and three ABS actuators. i was expecting to pay 300 - 600 bucks at least and wow...it cost me a WOPPING $53.00
popped that sucker on and holy crap it worked, only issues is a longer travel to get the brakes to grab, some air likely still in the system, but it grabs firm and stops well.
I learned some valuable information through all this, and thought it could be helpfull for someone in the future.
1. the Bosch ABS system does
NOT throw codes for a mechanical error.
2. there are two different systems and are not at all alike. the Bosch and the Denso, Bosch being more common.
3. the ABS systems are not interchangeable bewteen 92-93 or 97+. however the 4cyl actuator is exactly the same as the one used on the V6, at least on the gen3.
4. NEVER buya a new ABS actuator
5. leave the freekin strainer in the brake fluid resivoir IN PLACE
6. bench bleed the HELL out of that master cylinder, it traps a lot of bubbles that are hard to get rid of.
7. replacing the ABS actuator is VERY easy, figuring out that it is the actuator is not. (bleed the outgoing ports to determine if one is faulty, for me, fluid would ONLY go into the RF port but not out to the caliper)
A big thanks to Adam for helping me diagnose this issue.
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