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I have a 2000 Ford Econoline 250 van with approximately 30K miles.  It's been driven on a lot of salted roads and exposed to a lot of rain and I between these nasty environments got pretty well rusted rotors.  I had 2 shops say the rotors needed to be replaced (the rust went too deep to resurface the rotors), so I replaced them.

After getting them replaced, I noticed that there was a fair bit of smoke while driving around town at slow speeds.  I called the shop that did the replacement, and they said this was normal and should go away in a day or two as it the protective coating needed to wear off.

Then when I got it on the freeway, I quickly noticed that the van pulled sharply to the left when stepping on the brakes.  At this point I immediately when to another repair shop of the same franchise that replaced the rotors as I was 30 miles away.  They found that the right front caliper was stuck on which was the cause of the smoke, and the van pulling to the right when breaking.  For another $250, I had them replace the caliper.

Obviously, the shop replaced the rotors should have caught the caliper being stuck as it was pretty obvious to me that something was wrong after I got the van at freeway speeds.  But how likely is it that the repair shop actually damaged the calipers when they replaced the rotors, or was the calipers just another victim of rust?  

I know very little about breaking systems, so this may very well be a bit of a newbie question.  Also, if 1 caliper went out, are the other three also likely to have problems?

Thanks for your comments!

--Sandy  

Hi Sandy: When you called back to tell the shop that you saw smoke they really mishandled the response. First of all any good mechanic removes the protective coating on the rotor (usually cosmoline) before installation. Secondly if they are lazy and do not remove it any smoke would be gone in less than an hour of normal driving. When your talking about brakes and the liability issues the shop should have offered to tow the vehicle to the shop for safety reasons.

Finally when replacing rotors and or brake pads you have to compress the calipers which is actually pushing the piston back into its bore. Corrosion and rust can scratch damage and jam the caliper piston. But this should have been picked up the technician on his road test after replacing the brakes. You never release a vehicle back to the customer after replacing brakes until you verified the stopping ability of the vehicle by road testing it!

Mark Gittelman is an ASE Certified Master Technician With more than 23 years experience in the automotive repair business. For more free automotive information visit his car questions website.  
MasterTechMark http://www.auto-facts.org