2002 Acura 1.7EL: Replaced Front and Rear Brakes

[babzog]

Car is an Acura 1.7EL (brakes are compatible with the Civic Si/SiR).

So it was finally time to replace my brakes... enough of the jamming and shaking and horrible noises coming from the rear end and awful bone jarring shudders from the front. Yuck!

Still searching for a good source for quality parts (ie: brembo rear rotors) but for now, I picked up parts from local (ie: within a 20min drive from me) suppliers. Being that I live near the border, I picked up Wagner Thermoquiet pads (for the Civic Si) at Advance Auto Parts in the USA (for half the price they are in Canada) and rotors in Canada (virtually the same price as in the USA).

Part #'s:

Front rotors: Wagner BD61982
Front pads: Wagner Thermoquiet PD465A

Rear rotors: Autostar HO-589 (feller called them "Eurorotor"... what they had available).
Rear pads: Wagner Thermoquiet PD537

I followed directions for brake replacement for the front brakes from here and here and for the rear brakes from here.

My notes are few, but hopefully useful.

1. My Acura dealer told me "tight" when I asked what the proper torque figures were for this car. Pressed a bit more, he printed off the service manual pages for me.

Thus, the torque specs:

Front caliper bracket bolt: 17mm, 80 ft.lbs
Front caliper bolt: 12mm, 25 ft.lbs

Rear caliper bracket bolt: 14mm, 41 ft.lbs
Rear caliper bolt: 12mm, 17 ft.lbs

2. I had a Princess Auto torque wrench which failed on me and snapped the front caliper bolt (and thus, Princess Auto now has their torque wrench back). Part # for replacement is 45240-S01-A01 and it's $10. I also overtightened (due to incorrect info in the rear brake doc linked above) the rear caliper bracket bolt and decided to replace it. Part # 90103-SN7-003, $5.

3. I had trouble fitting the rear pads into their retainers. I thought I could ditch the retainer but the fellow at the parts desk told me to either adjust the pad (ie: fole it) or make sure I clean it really really well. I tried his latter advice first and found a lot of caked/baked on crud on the caliper bearing surface that, once removed, allowed the retainer to sit flat and thus permit the pads to slip right in. Thanks Honda parts guy!

4. The only bolts on which I elected to use German torque (gudenteight) were the rear caliper bolts, since 17 ft.lbs is not much and I'm not going to reef on it (and I don't want to buy, at this time, a torque wrench with a range small enough to just do those two, well four, bolts. Eventually...

5. For the article relating to the rear brakes... there is a lug sticking out of the pad that plugs into the slot on the caliper piston. The piston needs to be aligned to catch this lug. To that end, I took a couple of pics after I removed the left rear caliper to show the positioning of the piston and its effect on the pad. You can see the piston is just shy (CCW) of perfect alignment with the casting mark on the caliper. After I screwed it in, I got it aligned pretty much like the photo and only had to tweak it a bit after mounting.

That's all, I think. It was the first time I've ever changed brakes and it was pretty simple, really. The most time consuming part was spending the time to carefully scrape and clean the retainers and caliper bearing surfaces, apply anti-seize to the bolts and ensure everything torqued down correctly. If I just slapped it all out and in like a "by the hour" shop, I'd probably have been done in a couple of hours.

Brakes are nice, responsive and smooth! Pedal is solid and the car is once again, pleasurable to drive.

Caliper piston alignment (notice how the X doesn't quite align with the vertical casting mark to the right):


Piston marks on pad: