On our never-ending quest to improve this place by listening to feedback from the B&B, we are taking a new tack with these product posts, choosing instead to focus on items we use and have purchased with our own meagre income. After all, if we’re giving you the truth about cars, we ought to give you the truth about car accessories.
Car accessories or, in this case, car parts. We recently had a good experience installing a set of brake pads on an older Hyundai Elantra using the Guaranteed Fit program at eBay Motors.
That’s a program spearheaded by the online retailer – and, yes, we feel they are more a retailer than an auction house these days – in which certain vendors of car parts participate. All a buyer need do is plug in the year, make, and model (and sometimes trim, depending on the part yer looking for) into a series of drop down menus before they start clicking around searching for parts. The site will use this information to let users know if the part they’ve selected will fit their machine. If it is ordered and doesn’t work, the buyer can return it for free within a month of purchase.
The return policy isn’t really a gold plated benefit since most sites allow for hassle-free returns. However, the peace of mind that the part you’re ordering from whatever corner of the world is going to fit right out of the box is tough to overstate. How many of us have been in a situation where we’ve opened a package only to find two left-side whatevers or a gasket for a different engine? It’s infuriating. Vendors which participate in the program are a lot more apt to get this stuff right; and that’s the real benefit of this eBay program, we feel.
As for the gear we purchased, it arrived in jig time, safely packaged and with no obvious damage to the box. The latter is important but largely out of the hands of sellers who are at the mercy of delivery services, some of which operate at varying levels of competency. Robust packaging helps guard against disaster. The set of front brake pads came with the advertised shims and metal clips (the auto industry runs on shims, it seems) which made install dead simple.
In fact, shout out to engineers at Hyundai who designed the brake system for this generation of Elantra. After jacking up the car and removing a wheel, it took the easy removal of one simple 14 millimeter bolt on the brake caliper to permit the section containing the piston to rotate up and out of the way. Then it was just a matter of removing two clips and sliding the pads out of their metal shims. A gorilla like me had it done in 30 minutes; we bet an experienced Hyundai tech could have both sides done in half that time, such is the user-friendliness of the design.
As planned, this series of posts will continue to focus on items we actually use and have bought with our own money. We hope you found this one helpful.
[Images: Seller]
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