Well here are the embarrassing details of the weekend. This was my first car repair of any kind other than an oil change.

I changed the front rotors and pads on my 1991 300CE. The driver side rotor came off easily. New nicely machined Balo rotor, beefy Pagid pads and sensors. Old pads (Jurid?) had 2 stainless steel shims that I did not reinstall, just MB brake paste. There was just no room with the new rotor and pads. Cleaned and repacked the bearings, a messy and time consuming job. I was running short on time when I started the passenger side. The rotor was rusted on pretty good. Banging with a hammer and WD40 finally broke it loose. Ear plugs would have come in handy. Only had time to clean and regrease what was under the grease cap. Buttoned everything up and picked up my son from school. Brakes worked perfectly, no squeaks! Yea!

And now the embarrassing part. Went to flush brake fluid by MYSELF. Succeeded in getting a bunch of air in the lines. Enlisted my son to try and bleed with the 2 man method, and got nothing but air and a few dribbles of fluid from the rear calipers and the fluid in the reservoir never went down. Reservoir APPEARED full of fluid, so I kept pumping and bleeding with no success. I called my brother in law (former Caddy mechanic) and he suggested that I might have so much air in the system that I should try bleeding the fronts first. So I did that. Everything went textbook. Fluid went down in reservoir, old fluid came out of caliper, pedal dropped when I bled, etc. But I couldn’t get the rears bled. You can all probably guess what the problem was. My driveway is on a slight incline, nose of the car down. This plus jacking up the rear, prevented the fluid in the front and rear parts of the reservoir from equalizing. Only if I filled the reservoir to overflowing would the fluid then makes its way back to the rear compartment for the rear calipers. This, we discovered, only AFTER undoing the hydraulic lines at the ABS and master cylinder trying to locate how far fluid was getting and after pulling the master cylinder because we then thought the piston was somehow jammed too forward.

But all’s well that ends well. Brakes work super and thanks to all on the Forum.