Installing rear brake pads on a vehicle equipped with an integral parking brake may be difficult if you don’t know what you are doing.
For those who do not know an integral parking brake means that your caliper piston does two jobs. First it applies pressure to the pads when you press the brake pedal. Second it has a ratchet mechanism to apply pressure when you press the parking brake. How this system works is the caliper piston instead of just pushing out like it would on a normal system, rotates while it comes out. The rotation is how the parking brake applies. This is what makes changing brake pads difficult on these vehicles if you don’t have the correct tool. You need a tool that rotates and presses the piston in at the same time.
Before you even attempt to work on the rear brakes I recommend buying a brake kit like this LIS25000 Rear Caliper Set. This set will allow you to push in the piston while twisting it.
The Procedure
- Park your vehicle where you can work on it.
- Block the front wheels either using a block of wood or something else to prevent the vehicle from rolling in either direction when you are lifting the vehicle.
- Find a suitable position to jack in the rear of the vehicle. Use a jack and lift the vehicle up and support it with jack stands. If you don’t have a jack and jack stands this ATD7500 Jack Pack contains a jack and two jack stands.
- Remove the lug nuts that hold the tires in place.
- Remove the tires and set aside.
- You are now looking at the rear brakes. You will want to locate the caliper mounting bracket bolts and remove them.
- With the bolts removed you will want to remove the parking brake cable that is connected to the caliper.
- Lift the caliper off the rotor and support it using a clothes hanger or some zip ties to prevent damage to the lines.
- Remove the rotor from the spindle. You will want to determine if you can turn the rotors or not. If you can’t turn the rotors then you will have to replace them. Under no circumstances should you put on new pads with worn rotors.
- With your rotors in place that have either been replaced or turned you can turn your attention to the caliper. You can remove the two bolts that are holding the sliding part of the caliper on.
- Slide the caliper apart and set the mounting bracket to the side.
- Remove the pads from the caliper and the mounting bracket.
- You are almost ready to install your new pads; first you must depress the caliper piston. This is where this LIS25000 Rear Caliper Set comes in handy. You simply will set up the tool like it describes in the instructions. Before depressing the caliper piston you MUST LOOSEN THE BLEEDER SCREW. This is very important, if you don’t loosen the bleeder you can send old dirty fluid to an ABS controller which may damage a $1200 ABS controller.
- With the bleeder loosened you can depress the piston until the piston is all the way into the bore. Make sure that the notches in the piston are verticale because they have to line up with pins on the brake pads.
- You can now tighten the bleeder screw.
- Bolt your mounting bracket into place and torque it to the specifications. You will need a torque wrench such as this ATD101M Torque Wrench.
- Install your new brake pads into the mounting bracket.
- You will now want to grease the slid pins. USE ONLY BRAKE GREASE. MINERAL BASED GREASE WILL SWELL UP NEOPRENE SEALS.
- Slide the caliper on the mounting bracket and insert the guide pins.
- Insert the bolts that hold the pins in place and torque them.
- You will now move onto the next side.
- Refill the master cylinder with the correct brake fluid.
- You can reinstall the tires and torque the lug nuts in place.
You just finished installing new rear brake pads on your vehicle. You will want to make several firm stops to set in the brake pads and rotors. Go from 55 MPH to 0 MPH with a firm braking action; do this several times to make sure your brakes are seated properly.
Written by: Cody Mammenga an NDSCS Student
Tags: ATD, brake, brake pad, brake pads, Brakes, caliper, caliper piston, lis, lisle tools, parking brake, piston depressing, special tool, Tools
