Sometimes your expectations for a day just go out the window before you've even had the chance to get started. On September 11, 2016, I had planned to spent a lazy Sunday rummaging around the flea market and probably watching some patriotic TV (September 11th now being known as Patriot Day in the US).

This is not how I spent my day, though I did spend a pleasant two hours rummaging among dusty boxes and overloaded folding tables, I returned home and soon after encountered the horrific screeching that signaled a malfunction in one of my family's tiny Japanese commuter cars (fortunately not mine).

Fortunately for me, my aunt and uncle were visiting from St. Louis, and my uncle knows his way around cars. After isolating the screeching to the rear drivers' side of the vehicle, we proceeded to tear that sucker apart in search of the grimace- inducing noise. The culprit was a flat, slightly curved piece of metal that we found after removing the rear tire and the cover of the brake assembly. This curved metal piece, usually firmly fixed to a part known as a shoe, clattered to the ground as we removed the housing behind the rotor hub. The problem here being that the metal bit, no longer attached to its' shoe, was sliding around in the brake assembly(thus rendering that brake useless). So after removing the damaged parts and puttering the car home, we voyaged to the local auto shop in search of spare parts, and returned to begin repairs.

So it turns out car brakes are somewhat more complicated than the disk brakes of my childhood bicycle. A pair of "shoes" surround the rotor hub(the thing the center of the wheel rests on) and are attached to brake lines via several parts. The brake system exerts pressure via a fluid and pushes the shoes outward, making the curved metal plates create friction against their housings and slow the car.

This diagram hopefully brings sense to my ramblings, the Shoes are prominently located, and as you may have noticed, are connected to each other by several springs. These springs are a royal pain in the behind to remove, and we had to do so carefully, as the brake replacement kit included only the shoes, and their attached pins. Long story short, we salvaged the other pieces from the original brake assembly and put everything back together, good as new. Except that's not how it happened. Having reassembled the shoes and various other tiny and easy to lose components into a hopefully working brake, we attempted to reattach the housing that keeps all this stuff neatly packaged while driving, but it didn't fit. No matter how we tried, the cover refused to return to its proper place. For four hours my uncle, father, and I knelt, confused and angry, in my driveway, instructions and tools changing hands as we tried in vain to properly position the cover.

Here's where the moral of the day shows up, as well as the advice to not mess with something as important as your brakes without some prior knowledge: Instructions are good, read them whenever they're available, as it's usually better than guessing. After four agonizing hours of what should have been simple car repair, my father remembered that among our vast collection of do-it-yourself books there was a manual with complete schematics and maintenance instructions for our cars. Brushing off dust and rapidly flipping through pages lead me to a page much like the diagram above, except with color pictures of the end results. These pictures made me very sad. Because one of them portrayed the assembled brake assembly, but with one small difference to the real one sitting before us. The Return spring, labeled in the diagram, was backwards. Four hours of stubbed fingers, short tempers, and spilled brake fluid, just because a single spring was inserted backwards.

And that, ladies and gentlemen. Is why instructions (especially instruction manuals) are fantastic and should be revered alongside all things repair, even the mighty duct tape.