Why do you need rear brake service?

Allow me to show you what is included in your purchase of a basic rear disc brake service here at Louie and John’s Complete Auto Service. Your certified master technician will remove the tire that resides right here and underneath reside the rear disc brakes of your modern vehicle. There’s a rear disc hydraulic caliper, rear disc brake pads, and a rear disc brake rotor. Your certified master technician will proceed to remove the pins from the actual caliper itself (the actual screws), hold the caliper off to the side, and hang it up. And the reason why that’s important to say is because there’s a hydraulic brake hose that resides right here and if it gets stretched, it could break, and we don’t want that to happen.

After that, your certified master technician will remove the disk brake pads, and will check to make sure that the caliper guide pins in the back are actually loose. If they’re not loose, there’s a separate upcharge in an additional service that we have to perform on your existing caliper brackets in order to make sure that these pins are loose.

From that point, the bracket will be removed, the disc brake rotor will be taken to a disc brake lathe and resurfaced–a brand new surface right here. (You’ll see that also in a video coming up.)

What’s included in the rear disc brake service?

Once the rotor is resurfaced, the shims are discarded. There’s a brand new set of shims that come with your purchase of your disc brake service. These shims reside on the bottom and the top, two on this side, and two on the other side, so a total of four shims. Also, you’ll get a brand new set of rear disc brake pads for the vehicle. There’s an outboard pad that resides here, an inboard pad that resides here, and two more that reside on the other side, outboard and inboard, so a total of four pads.

Okay, so here we have what your master certified technician would do with your actual reusable brake rotor. The brake rotor itself is mounted on this brake lathe, the very specialized machine that actually cuts the surface so that it’s nice and shiny. Look at the before: it’s all rusted and kind of scored out. On the completed rotor, here’s the outboard surface, and of course the inboard surface gets done the same way. This is the finish that you want to see that basically allows a brand new set of brake pads to be reused. Now, some of you might ask: why can’t we just resurface all rotors? Well, rotors have a certain thickness to them, and the brake friction literally wears out the friction, makes it thinner and thinner, and there’s a tolerance, and if it’s very close to the tolerance, or underneath, we have to literally replace the brake rotors. So, that’s the reason why we also have a pad and brake rotor service. So now you know what happens with the brake lathe.

Here are some of the things that could trip up your certified master technician as they’re doing the basic rear disc service with or without rotors on your modern vehicle. Your caliper guide pad bracket here has pins in the back–right here is the one I’m pointing with my finger. These are supposed to move in and out like this with the boot actually following along, this boot right here. But, over time, what happens in Michigan, pins get stuck because of moisture, dirt, and debris in our atmosphere. This pin on this cover right here is physically stuck, I can’t move it. So your certified master technician will take the bracket off the vehicle, put it on to our bench vise, take a physical torch and heat the top and the bottom surfaces of this caliper guide bracket, and start working these pins loose. And over time, the pins come out, and they’ll look like this. So the pin itself will be cleaned up, will be honed to a nice shiny surface, we’ll apply brand new lubricant on, if the pin boot itself is bad, we’ll replace the pin boot as well, and then we’ll reinstall everything. So this takes approximately 40 minutes, in addition, to do the top and bottom on this side and the top and bottom on the other side to make sure that these pins are physically nice and smooth for the action of your brakes to give you the best brake feel.

Here are some other things that can go actually awry when your master certified technician is actually repairing your front disk brakes on your vehicle. So, these are what are called the hydraulic brake calipers and if you notice, there are two pistons. They are literally pushed back in by the power of your service technician, and they need to go back in in order to accommodate the new width of the brand new brake pads going into these brackets right here.

And, continuing on with the same vehicle, for example, what happens is this hydraulic brake caliper, the pistons are actually stuck. So no matter with how much force we apply to push them back into their bore, they get stuck out which means that your vehicle will also need hydraulic brake calipers. These are some of the contingencies that we see here at Louie and John’s Complete Auto Service. This one is a hydraulic brake caliper malfunction that is needed on top of the pads and the rotors, which we’ll get you an estimate on as well..