I have been out travelling for a while now and just got back home....when i started my max today, the brake light in the instrument cluster was on....after checking my hand break i checked the brake fluid level and the BF reservoir is EMPTY??!!!!

there is no puddle beneath the car, no stains where the car was parked for the month..nothing!!!.....so where did the break fluid go????

the brake pedal touches the floor now....but i dont plan on driving the car until i figure what happened

anybody has any ideas?thanks

 

someone drain it as a joke??? thats weird

 

probably a bad master cylinder. refill the reservoir and see what happens.. but usually, if there's no leaks and the fluid is gone, it's likely to have run down inside the brake booster canister and is puddling there.

you can either rebuild or replace your master cylinder at that point. it's not hard to rebuild and I've had good results with other cars, but never had to replace one on a Max yet so I can't tell you if rebuilding them works or not.
replacement should only be around $50 or so for a remanufactured unit.

 

which one is the brake booster canister?

Is it possible that more than one of my brake callipers are frozen or something like that? i have 4 wheel discs.

i wanna be sure before i get on the road after refilling the reservoir. it probably wont be very nice if the brakes went while i'm driving.

 

Yep. Your master cylinder is leaking from the seal that conects to the brake booster. It's that black canister that's bolted to the firewall and is bolted to the master cylinder. We didn't find any leaks until it filled up with brake fluid and started pouring out from between the M.C. and B.B.

Chris

 

yup, what he said. it's the big black can. remoce the master cylinder from it (couple bolts on the sides and the metal brake lines) and you'll probably see that it's leaking down inside it.

if you do this job, you'll need a quart of brake fluid to refill when you get it all back together. If you've got ABS, then you'll need 2 or 3 quarts to bleed the entire system out again. ugh.