Freeing up the brakes

At this point I was fed up of how hard it was to move the car about (engine was still not running at this point) so I decided it was time to strip the brakes down and see what kind of state they were in. The calipers on the 944 are a floating caliper affair with a single piston (same as the 928 I believe). Once the frame is split into two the piston housing can be knocked off of the frame to leave you with three pieces.

On my poor aging brakes the dust cover on pretty much every caliper was split which had caused all sorts of dirt and water to get in and which had in turn done a pretty good job of stopping the pistons from sliding in and out smoothly. These pictures should do a pretty good job of explaining why they were stuck.

As you can see from the above pictures rust had formed at the bottom of the piston housing and had also caused a bit of pitting on the piston itself which meant this one was fit for the bin. The following pictures are of the same caliper after a cleanup.

Despite being so damaged the other calipers were pretty servicable after a strip down and rebuild and once put back on the car it moved nice and freely instead of being similar to trying to push a lorry uphill. At this point they were rebuilt with the old seals and dust covers whilst a second set of calipers were sourced so I could create one good set with new seals out of the two sets I had. Now all four wheels have rebuilt calipers with fresh seals and fresh dust covers.