Caution: Brake Caliper Hardware Loose

[Floracycle]

Riding with my wife on pillion today when the front right caliper fell off during braking. Fortunately no real harm done could have been far worse. Pulled over with the caliper hanging from the brake line bouncing around as I slowed down. Both bolts and reflector missing. Found all of the hardware together in the middle of the road. Good Samariton stopped by and assisted and he had some loctite. Fixed it on the spot. Checked the bolts on the left caliper finger tight only. :-[ Fixed those also. Reported to dealer who was very understanding and offered to resolve. Please everyone check your bike, the brakes are the most important component. Normally I do this with a new bike immediatly but got complacent this time. With 500 miles on her I was going to go through it at 600.

Normally a lurker here and on ADVrider but wanted to post before someone got hurt. Thanks for the community and safe riding.

 

[Kidder]

Riding with my wife on pillion today when the front right caliper fell off during braking. Fortunately no real harm done could have been far worse. Pulled over with the caliper hanging from the brake line bouncing around as I slowed down. Both bolts and reflector missing. Found all of the hardware together in the middle of the road. Good Samariton stopped by and assisted and he had some loctite. Fixed it on the spot. Checked the bolts on the left caliper finger tight only. :-[ Fixed those also. Reported to dealer who was very understanding and offered to resolve. Please everyone check your bike, the brakes are the most important component. Normally I do this with a new bike immediatly but got complacent this time. With 500 miles on her I was going to go through it at 600.

Normally a lurker here and on ADVrider but wanted to post before someone got hurt. Thanks for the community and safe riding.

Thanks for the tip and glad you weren't hurt.

 

[Koinz]

Wow, good thing no one got injured. Thanks for the reminder.. I hope your dealer bends over backwards the next time you visit; that is if you decide to use him again. ???

 

[colorider]

Welcome to the Forum and thanks for posting the warning!!! Glad it all worked out for you and hopefully the dealer will use this as a wake up call!!

Rod

 

[colorider]

Your subject line is misleading. However, thanks for the tip and glad you weren't hurt.

I changed it.....

 

[Rynn Storm]

For the other readers, this was clearly an issue with the dealer as the bike ships with the front wheel off. Not the fault of Yamaha. I have heard of this same issue on various bikes during a simple tire change. As stated by others, always worth taking a close look your bike when it leaves 'any' dealer.

 

[HoebSTer]

This is one reason why I insisted in helping with the set up and chose a small dealer 60 miles away. Most dealers use a third party who hires a minimum wage yawhoo for assembly.

 

[Twitch]

Dang! Glad nothing worse come out of that. Could have been catastrophic!

Someone at your dealer needs their azz kicked.

Oh, and welcome to the forum.

 

[markjenn]

I've had a single bolt back out, but never had the caliper come off completely. Definitely scary and very lucky you were able to find both bolts together on the road - I would think the more likely failure scenario would be that one bolt would back out and be lost and the other would hang on for awhile. Perhaps when one or the other is lost the other sees a rotational force that quickly causes it to go AWOL. I'd inspect the caliper pretty carefully - I've got to think it bashed the fork leg pretty good before it left the scene.

Definitely an assembly goof up. Probably put the calipers on, hand threaded the screws, tightened the axle/pinch, and never came back and tightened the caliper bolts. I'd be checking all the front end torques.

I'm always a little surprised that mfgs often don't spec some type of locking mechanism or thread locker for these critical bolts. I just checked and Yamaha specs no thread locker. Are they a special kind of bolt? Certainly using thread locker is probably a good idea, although when you use it where it is not specified, then the torque values, presumably based on dry bolts, are theoretically not correct.

- Mark