Lube your caliper pins!

[Gregg86DX]

I just wanted to share my experience this weekend. I have been having problems with my brakes and after replacing the Master Cylinder and bleeding them many times, I was still getting spongy brakes and too much pedal travel. I finally figured out the upper pin on each front caliper was totally frozen. I ended up having to remove the caliper assembly and heat them with a torch to get them free. Of course, this destroyed any rubber in that area.

I was going to just take them for exchange, but the exchange calipers do not include the bracket that holds the pin, so I still had to get the bastards apart!.

The lesson here is this situation is easy to avoid by simply checking and relubing these pins and it is super easy. Just a 14mm socket to loosen the lower pin and remove it, then pivot the caliper up until it slides off the upper pin. Lube those babies up with your favorite high-temp grease and re-assemble. You could probably do this once a year and have it stay perfect.

You don't have to touch the pads or bleed anything. It's maybe an hour job if you stop to drink beer every 5 minutes.

I spent $80 on the MC, $80 for the calipers and $35 for the pads and the only real problem was the frozen pins. The existing pads had a lot of meat, but they were worn very unevenly so I replaced them.


Just FYI,
Gregg

[RobT5580]

Yeah i have that problem which warped one of my big AEM rotors so i have to get them resurfaced when i take the car apart. One trick i learned from Audi is to take a small round wire brush and attach it to a high speed drill and run it through the hole. They tend to fill up with crap and even lube wont fix it cause i did lube mine but it didnt move freely cause the hole close up a bit.

[smufguy]

the high temp grease goes on the pad clips

Anti-vibration lube goes on the face of the pad towards the caliper.

Saw it way too many times when i mechanic did it. He also mentioned they were really crucial for it and the anti-vibration lube looked silverish.