Caliper painting

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The workshop floor in Sharjah, with cars waiting on and between the two-post lifts.

Caliper painting

The caliper is the metal clamp you can see through the spokes of your wheel; it is what squeezes the brake pads against the disc to stop the car. It spends its life in heat, brake dust and road salt, so it goes brown and rough long before it stops working, and on a car with open wheels it is one of the first things anyone sees. Painting it is cosmetic work, and this page is honest about that — it does not improve your brakes. What it does is take a corroded, dirty component back to clean metal and refinish it in heat-resistant paint, in a colour you choose, so the wheel looks finished rather than neglected.

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Start here

  1. 1Describe what the car is doing, in your words
  2. 2We investigate it and send you the findings and the price
  3. 3You approve each line before anything is done

1

Sounds like your car?

Find the line closest to what your car is doing. You do not need the name of the job — the symptom is carried into the booking form with it, and every line below starts at the same place: what we check, and how the work is done.

Symptom, in your words Carries into the booking form

2

What is included

  1. 2.1Wheels off, all four corners, so the caliper is worked on properly rather than brushed at through the spokes
  2. 2.2Brake condition reported while the wheels are off — pads, discs and any leak — because the caliper is already in front of us and you should know if it needs work
  3. 2.3Old paint, brake dust and corrosion taken back mechanically to sound metal
  4. 2.4Everything the paint must not reach — the piston, the dust seal, the slide pins and the bleed nipple — masked before anything is applied
  5. 2.5Caliper refinished in high-temperature brake caliper paint in the colour you choose
  6. 2.6Brake dust shields and caliper carriers refinished to match where you want them, priced as their own line
  7. 2.7Any manufacturer lettering on the caliper reinstated only if it was there to begin with; we do not add a name that was never on your car
  8. 2.8Slide pins cleaned and re-greased on reassembly, because they are exposed anyway and a seized pin wears a pad out on one side
  9. 2.9Wheel bolts torqued to the maker figure on refitting, not run down with a gun
  10. 2.10A road test and a check for rubbing or a dragging brake before the car is handed back
The inside of the workshop looking out through the open front onto the street.

This work is done in this workshop, and nothing on your car is touched until you know what we found and what it costs.

3

What happens

  1. 3.1

    Wheels off, and the brakes looked at while they are

    All four wheels come off, because a caliper cannot be prepared properly through a wheel. That also means the brakes are fully exposed, so we look at the pads, the discs and the seals and tell you what we see. We are not going to refinish a caliper that is leaking, or paint around pads that have days left in them, without telling you first. Any brake work is quoted separately and is yours to accept or decline.

  2. 3.2

    Preparation is the job; the colour is the easy part

    Paint sprayed onto a caliper that is still dirty, greasy and flaking comes off in sheets within months, which is why so many painted calipers look worse than the bare ones next to them. The old finish and the corrosion are taken back to sound metal first. If the preparation is skipped, the colour will not hold, and the only reason to do this job at all is that it holds.

  3. 3.3

    The parts that must stay bare, stay bare

    A caliper is not a lump of metal. The piston has to slide, the rubber dust seal around it has to flex, the slide pins have to move freely in their bores, and the bleed nipple has to open. Paint on any of those causes a real fault — a brake that drags, a pad that wears on one side, a nipple that rounds off at the next fluid change. They are masked before a drop goes on, and the caliper is refinished with a paint made to sit in brake temperatures rather than an aerosol from a shelf.

  4. 3.4

    Back together properly, and road tested

    The slide pins are cleaned and greased on the way back together, since the caliper is apart in front of us and dry pins are one of the commonest causes of uneven pad wear. Wheel bolts go back to the manufacturer torque with a wrench, not a rattle gun. Then the car is driven and the brakes checked for drag or noise before you get it back, because a cosmetic job that leaves a brake binding is not a cosmetic job any more.

4

Common questions

Does painting the calipers affect the brakes?

Done properly it should not, and done badly it certainly can. The risk is entirely about what gets masked: paint on the piston, the dust seal, the slide pins or the bleed nipple causes a brake that drags, a pad that wears unevenly or a nipple you cannot open at the next fluid change. It also does not improve your braking in any way — this is appearance work and we would rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise.

Will the paint last, or will it burn off?

Caliper paint is made for the temperatures brakes reach, so heat alone is not usually what kills it. What kills it is preparation: paint over dirt, grease or flaking old finish lifts, no matter what is in the tin. That is why most of the labour on this job is stripping and cleaning rather than spraying. We will not quote you a number of years — that depends on how you drive and where the car lives — but we will tell you honestly what we are doing to make it hold.

Can you paint them the colour of a particular car maker?

We will paint them any colour you choose. What we will not do is stamp or print a manufacturer name onto a caliper that never carried one, because that turns a paint job into a claim about your car that is not true, and any competent inspection or buyer will spot it. If your caliper had its own lettering before we started, it goes back on.

Do all four have to be done?

No, but understand what you are choosing. Front and rear calipers are often different shapes and sizes anyway, so doing the fronts alone can look deliberate. Doing three and leaving one will not — it will simply look like one was missed. Tell us which wheels you want done and we will price them as separate lines and tell you honestly how the result will look.

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