Brake issue – Like bad booster, but isn’t.

[Rip Tides]

Got a freebie project car back year and half ago, 2000 Alero, 150k on odo, falied LIM and cracked cylinder. I’m a pretty seasoned garage repair guy so I took my time turning it into a great daily driver, I found a low mileage 3400 engine that I rebuilt with a few mild performance upgrades (cam, beefy timing, valve springs, ported intake). It’s a sorta sleeper but been very enjoyable performance ride for the 7 months I commuted in it.

Then a buddy unloaded a F150 on me for cheap cheap cheap about 3 months back, and I kept the Alero parked in my garage over the winter while driving that. Go to clean out the garage with spring having arrived and suddenly stiff pedal syndrome hits on the Alero. The car will stop when I get on the pedal hard. And if I do short hard neck snapping stand up on the pedal stops it pops the ABS light now until I turn off and restart the engine. I’ve done all the diagnostics on the Brake booster about 6 times over now, it checks fine, it gets great vac, the check valve is good as well as another one I stopped and pulled from a local pick n pull just to satiate my paranoia.

So I spent my entire Saturday yesterday going over each wheel and caliper that already has (7-month used) new rotors, pads, re-bled them out fully again with new fluid. For all of 5 minutes after this the brakes were fine then BLAM pedal stiffened right back up, I have about a 1/2″ movement on the pedal now, when before I parked it 3-months ago the car had some awesome brake feel since I went premium on all my stuff and really really took my time. In fact I was kinda proud how good I did on this car and how great it felt with stopping performance to match the engine.

Now the only thing that’s suspicious is I’ve got a funky creak out of the drivers side front caliper when stopping, when I checked yesterday it did NOT seem stuck or frozen, no uneven pad wear on it, but then again.. would this cause the super stiffening, and why?

Right now I’ve been thinking about selling the Alero since it was so well done it’s got some good resell value locally and I can use the money for suspension upgrades in the F150. But I’m the type of guy to not want to unload a car with some creeping funky brake issue the new owner will curse me about later on.

Topic

[college man]

It sounds like the abs is having an issue with the light coming on.
Can you pull the abs code? try pulling the abs fuse to see if the
problem goes away. if so abs issue. To get a better lead on the problem
pull any codes.

[Rip Tides]

I’ve tried pulling codes with a unit that does ABS and didn’t get anything. But this (ABS light deal) happened before my inspection and re-bleed yesterday. After all that work yesterday I got the car out after midnight and drove the hell out of the car and braked super hard and wasn’t getting any more ABS light on. But one of the things that did bother me was that the way under a year old fluid coming out of the car’s brake system yesterday sure was dark GREEN. It’s funny how I drove the car daily for so long with it acting like a new car, park it for 3 months and now that and a few other strange issues are popping up.

Ugh, it’s starting to look like I’m going to just part out this car instead of selling it whole. There’s a few Grand Am and Alero clubs around that would probably take the engine and brake parts and w/e else off me and I’ll just junk the body. It can join the other 3-4 dozen Alero’s/Grand Ams at the local yard close to me. These cars don’t really scream quality on much of the parts.

[Vince]

I can’t help with the brake issue but I encourage you to take your time with the decision to part out the car.You have obviously put a lot of time into it and this one problem is setting you back.It might be that when you find the problem later you may think “Is that all it was? How did I miss that?” Besides,you will feel better after you find the problem rather than leaving it Bro.It would be one thing if you didn’t care but you obviously do Bro if you put so much care into it.Take care man, Vincent

[Lorrin Barth]

Have you checked if any wheels are getting hot?

[Author]

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