Brakes and Rotors

My wife's PT cruiser has needed the brakes done so it has been on the list.  They have been scraping when she applied the brake, so it is time to change them.  My neighbor was kind enough to allow me to once again use his garage to perform the maintenance and show me how to do it.  This trip into the garage is only the front brakes, the rear ones will require a second trip in as there is only so much time in the evening to get the work done.

This was a fairly straight forward process.  We jacked up the front of the car and chalked the rear wheels.  We took the front wheels off.  On the brake caliper there is a bolt to hold the caliper to the wheel hub.  We undid that bolt and pulled the calliper off of the rotor.  You don't want the caliper to hang by the brake hose if you are going to put it down so we tied them up.  Also, sometimes you need to spend some time working on the rotor to get it off, so you need it up out of the way.  Luckily for us the calipers just slid off.  I popped the pads out of the caliper.  They were pretty low, almost down to the metal.  Because we had added brake fluid a few weeks ago we needed to get a clamp on the caliper piston to bring it back so that we could insert the new pads.  The side closes to the piston is the side that had the metal tab on the side of the caliper.  With the extra fluid in the reservoir when we compressed both calipers we had some overflow from the reservoir.  Once the pads were in, we just reversed the process to get everything back to normal. 

I hear there may be some surprises with the rear rotors, but we will have to find out.  Also, my Pathfinder will need new pads this fall, but I hear the rotors are difficult to get off in a Pathfinder, so I need to leave some extra time for that job.

Anyways, after changing pads this is something that most people should be at least aware of how to do, and do it once.  Please leave some of your tricks for doing brake work down in the comments section.