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How to service your brakes if you live in an area with snow

Our first step is to sand off all the rust from various important places. This is the critical step: Get Rid Of That Rust. It caused your problems in the first place, and you need to banish it from your kingdom.

We start with the slide shim surfaces. Using some 50 or 80-grit emery cloth, sand all four L-shaped slide shim surfaces back to shiny bare metal as much as you can. The more you sand, the better it is. I'm sanding the lower ones here. The upper ones were too awkward to take a picture of.

Newer Honda slide-shim surfaces have a slightly different shape than that shown here, but the idea is the same.

A note here: some people advocate the use of wire brushes to get rid of the rust. I don't recommend that for two reasons: Firstly, wire brushes tend to polish up the rust rather than remove it. Secondly, the pad slide surfaces have several sharp corners that wire brushes cannot get at, regardless of whether they're hand-held or power rotary. If the rust is heavy enough, just use a new flat-blade screwdriver as a scaper. That will get rid of 90% of the rust, leaving just the final finish to the emery cloth.




Clean these puppies off too. They're stainless steel, so they don't rust, but the underside (where they sit on the mount bracket) tends to pick up rust deposits. Use the emery cloth and scrub well. When they're clean, don't install them just yet, lay them aside for now.

Another note: these shims do eventually wear and distort. When they do, they will contact the rotor and make an extremely high-pitched squeaking sound. If they're more than ten years old, spend the bucks and get new ones. You may, however, be able to salvage the existing ones if you bend them up a bit.




Next is the pins. Remember we had a couple that were a bit fuzzy? Easy fix, and it's fun too: Get your power drill and clamp it into a bench vise. We're making an impromptu lathe.

Chuck the pin in place, pull the trigger to rotate the pin and use some more emery cloth to cut the rust off until the pin is shiny again. Try to preserve the existing profile as much as possible, folding the emery cloth sharply to get into the corners of the groove in the pin. Run the emery cloth in the groove, up the ramp, just behind the pin's head. The shaft of the pin you can just sand by hand afterwards, and you WILL need to do that if you find rust on it.




All done! Looks almost like new, if you squint a bit. The Parkerizing that was originally on it is gone now of course, so watch carefully during succeeding services for more rust and seizing.




Now you need to clean all the rust (or as much as you can) out of the pin's hole in the mount bracket. This can be troublesome, as some of the grease is often still there in the depths of the hole, making it messy work.

Messy it might be, but it is absolutely necessary. If there's rust in the bore, it will make the pin that much tighter once installed. Use a small rat-tail file. Break it in half if necessary to get it short enough to use. Sand all around inside, wipe or blow off the dust/goop, sand some more. To wipe any old grease out of the bore, wrap a piece of old T-shirt around the file and use that to swab out the bore. Repeat until cloth is reasonably clean.

If all you've got is rust powder and no old grease, you can use one of those bendy drinking straws to blow into the bore and blow out the rust before wiping. Using the straw means you can blow and your face won't be in the way of the powder as it's ejected from the bore.
Sometimes that pin is well and truly seized in its hole, and the only way of fixing it properly is to remove the caliper mount bracket from the car.




When you finally reinstall the rubber boot (later, not now), the groove it sits in needs to be cleaned as well. Unfortunately, since it is difficult to spin your car in a power drill, you'll need to just use that emery cloth as carefully and thoroughly as you can to make sure those grooves are clean. If you leave ridges of rust, the boots won't seal properly, leading to accelerated re-rusting.




Let's try-fit that pin. As you insert and withdraw it, it will probably come out with some old goop on it. Wipe that off and reinsert. The pin should be a loose fit. If you wiggle the pin side to side, you will feel play. If you do not, the pin is too tight; there is still rust in the bore. Repeat with the file and the T-shirt.




See that tube? It's Sil-Glyde. It's a really, really thick lubricant, which is ideal for us. It's silicone-based, so it won't attack rubber. And because it's super thick, it resists being blasted away by winter slush. Use lots of it. Lots and lots. You can't really overdo it.
Lube the pin all over well. Put lots in and over the boot. Get Sil-Glyde all over everything; make sure it's all covered well.

Honda, and some on the Web, recommend ordinary silicone greases. These are fine for warmer climates, but are too thin to stay in place on winter roads. I experimented with it one winter and was appalled by the results.

Do NOT use anti-seize or other petroleum greases. These will attack the rubber of the boots and destroy them.




Now one thing I never got a picture of was to show that the boot goes on the caliper mount bracket FIRST, THEN the pin slides into it. At a later date, I did. Those pics are here.

Make sure the boot is fully seated in both the pin groove and the mount bracket groove. Rotate the boot a bit to make sure it's seated and that the grease has been evenly distributed. Work the pin in and out a few times, rotating as you go before seating the boot in the pin's groove, the rotate it again once the boot is seated. You will probably have to "burp" the boot to release excess air. As you press the pin all the way in the boot will bulge with air and excess grease. With your thumb and forefinger, pinch the boot upwards to pull a gap at the pin groove; this will allow excess air to escape. Once the caliper is back on, you can "burp" the boot again if needed.




Here it is, all greasy and sealed up well. Should last the winter (hopefully). If you have persistent trouble with one pin seizing regularly, replace the pin. I keep a couple of spares handy just in case.

Here we are, pads in place, ready for the caliper. Squeeze the pads together against the rotor with your fingers, just to make sure they're seated. It will help the caliper go on more easily. Notice that in the photo the upper pin boot doesn't look like it has fresh grease on it. It has not; it wasn't seized, so I left it alone. You'll find it's usually the lower pin that seizes first.

By the way, check the pad thickness. If there is MORE than 1/8" difference in thickness from one to the other, it's best to replace the set. That difference means the brakes have been seized for some time.

However, so long as at least one pad has at least 1/8" of pad left at the thinnest point, you can reinstall them, but watch them closely. With such little pad thickness, they will wear down to minimum quickly (1/16"). Also, a large difference in pad thickness can result in the car pulling when you step on the brakes, on account of significantly mismatched heat-sink mass. See how evenly  mine are worn? :^)

We're almost there. Caliper's back and smiles all around. Getting the caliper back on can be a bit tricky if you don't push the piston back in a bit with a C-clamp. I usually don't push the piston back in; by the time I've sanded off all the rust and squeezed the pads together as I feed the caliper back on, there's plenty of room. Having said that, there's a bit of good to be gained by pushing the pistons back in a bit with a C-clamp even if you don't really have to: It helps free up a slightly gummed up piston. As the caliper goes back on, make sure the squeal shims aren't pushed off the pads by the piston or hooks.

If you're replacing the pads, you will definitely need to push the piston back in all the way with a C-clamp or other tool. Keep an eye on the Master Cylinder level as you push the piston in, and use a turkey baster to slurp up any excess before it spills out.  However, it's really best to open that caliper's bleed nipple before pushing the piston back in. Pushing old fluid back into the ABS system can invite major disaster. Put a hose on the bleed nipple, put the other end in a jar to catch the old fluid, then push the piston back.

Also, watch the pins. You may have to push them in a bit more to get around the caliper, and they have flats on their heads that should line up with similar flats on the caliper body. Make sure the pins are rotated correctly before bolting them back down again! If you find they spin as you try to do up the bolts, just hold the pins against the caliper's flats with your fingers.This will hold them still for you. Torque to 24 ft lbs. "Burp" the boots again if you have to, to get any excess air out of them.