A broken tool, a stuck part and fixing them
Posted By RichC on June 25, 2016
In rounding out and connecting the dots in a couple previous posts, I’ll summarize with a short post and what happened.
When reinstalling the brake caliper slides the other day on the BMW X5 35d, I snapped off my Craftsman branded hex socket when tightening down the slide. It was careless on my part as I’ve grown use to using "wobble extensions" and was putting undue side pressure on the hardened steel hex bit. 
So … the tip snapped off "inside" the slide bolt and it was of course fully tightened. No amount of finagling could get the broken tip to come out. Even after tearing the protective rubber boot off the slide and gripping with small lock-jaw pliers it would not loosen. So eventually I ground a slot big enough to either use a flat bladed screwdriver … or as it would turn out, rattle out the tip of the hex bit with a little "picking" with my late father-in-law’s dental tool — thank you DadH!
Now all was good … except that left me with needing a new slide bolt and rubber boot (so I ordered from Amazon with Prime like a millennial would). 
No problem anyway because I attempted to "cheap out" and not purchase a new Front Brake Pad Sensor and instead carefully removed the "still good" old sensor.
Tip: That is a bad idea, because the Carly for BMW app I used to reset the computer requires a new sensor before resetting the ECU service monitor. Ugh!
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