Chevrolet GMC Buick Isuzu Saab Front & Rear Ceramic Brake Pad & Rotor Kit TRQ BKA11678

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20+ years' experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video we're going to show you how to change the rear brakes on this 2004 Trailblazer same as most '02 to '09 GM mid-size SUV; the Trailblazer, Envoy, Bravada, Ranier, Saab 97x as well as the Isuzu Ascender. Tools you'll need: various size millimeter sockets with a ratchet, you'll want a breaker bar or a pipe for some extra leverage, two M10 x 7cm bolts, jack and jack stands, flat blade screwdriver, and a large C-Clamp, as well as a wire brush.

Rear tire, lug nuts are 19mm. If you don't have air tools you want to start with the vehicle on the ground, loosen the lug nuts, raise it, support it with jack stands, and then remove the lug nuts. I'll fast forward here as I remove the rest of the lug nuts and remove the wheel.

To check the condition of your brakes what you want to do is look right into this access hole and I'm going to turn the rotor a little bit so you can see the rotor. Right next to the rotor you can see the pad and it has a small hole there and even on the other side is a small hole. That hole is actually your wear indicator and since you can still see the hole that means that the pads actually have some more wear left probably on this vehicle another five or ten thousand miles. And then you also want to check the condition of your rotors, and you just want to run the back of your finger up and down just make sure that there's no deep grooves or anything in the rotors and even though these rotors look a little bit rusty it's just because the car hasn't been used a lot.

One thing we're going to do is take a large screwdriver and just carefully pry out on our caliper. That just gives us a little room to get it off and then the caliper is held on by two 14mm bolts, one down low and then one right up high. We'll fast forward through loosening and removing those bolts. They should come out pretty easy because you only tighten them up to about 15 to 20 foot pounds. Now the caliper comes right off, and you can use your screwdriver to pry out the pads.

Now to remove your rotors you're going to have to remove this bracket and there's two bolts; one here and one here. These bolts are 18mm. Always good if you're doing your own work to have a little piece of pipe around if you don't have a breaker bar because you're going to want to put your ratchet on here. These bolts are usually tightened to anywhere from 90 to 100 foot pounds. Just put your pipe on the wrench and then just go slow and easy apply pressure and loosen up the bolt. Now our other bolt, the sway bar is kind of in the way so what I'm going to do is take the 18mm wrench and then I'm going to hook my 17mm or just another wrench on here put them together like that. This gives me some extra leverage again. And again, pull nice and easy and slow and you'll break it free.

We'll speed it up here again as I use the wrench and the ratchet to remove those two 18mm bolts the rest of the way. That bracket comes off. Now if you're lucky pull your brake rotor right off. I'm not quite that lucky. I have two I believe these are either M10 or M12 bolts. Thread them right in. 17 mm heads. That will just help you get it out some, and that comes right off. So you might notice I've got a nice new backing plate and a new wheel stud on here. You can check out our other videos to see how I did those. The new disc from 1AAuto fits right on nicely. Now you'll want to reinstall your bracket. The bolt goes through and into the back of the axle. So, I've got my bolts preliminarily tightened. I'm going to use a torque wrench to tighten them to 90 foot pounds.

Before you go to put the brake pads on you want to make sure of a couple of things. These should slide back and forth nice and easily, nice and free. If they don't you can actually just pull them right out, clean them up and grease them and make sure that they move freely. Then these slides just kind of pull off and you want to take a wire brush and clean them out. So I've cleaned up this one and you don't have to get them perfect just get them cleaned out a little bit. Press them back into place, and now the new pads from 1AAuto, push them down in. They push into place. Same thing with the rear one here, push it down in. Push it in place.

So now if you go to put the caliper on you're going to find it doesn't fit, and that's because this piston has worked its way out as the pads wear. Just take an old pad put it right down, a nice big C-Clamp here. I'm going to use this C-Clamp to slowly push the piston back in. Make sure you work this gasket in, and now your caliper quite easily works down onto the new shoes, bolts in. Just going to fast forward as I just put those bolts in and preliminarily tighten them. You may find when you're tightening them you want an adjustable wrench or this looks like probably about a 15mm and you can just hold on to this nut right here. Mine seem to be going together pretty easily, and now we're going to torque those bolts to 20 foot pounds.

Now we are going to fast forward as we put the tire back on then start each one of the lug nuts by hand. You do want to make sure that you don't cross thread them, and then using our air wrench just preliminarily tighten the lug nuts. And now with the vehicle on the ground, torque the lug nuts to 100 foot pounds each, and please stay tuned to the very important last step which is to pump your brakes up before you try and road test your vehicle. And last but not least, you want to pump your brakes a bunch of times until you feel your pedal firm back up before you road test your vehicle and you can then just try and make sure you do a stop at five and ten miles an hour before going out on the road.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com-- your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet. Please feel free to call us toll free, 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the internet and in person.

Okay, friends, one of the first things we need to do to start this job is to safely raise and support the vehicle. I like to raise it directly on the frame. Once you have the wheel off the ground, we're going to remove our center cover. That exposes our 19-millimeter lug nuts. Remove them all, and then remove the wheel.

I'm gonna you use an 18-millimeter to hold the slider from spinning. And then I'm gonna come right from the backside of the caliper, and I'm gonna remove my 13-millimeter nuts that hold the caliper to the bracket. Okay. We've got both our bolts here. Slide the caliper off. It's always a great idea to inspect the caliper directly. Look along these boots to make sure you don't see any moisture or anything like that. And you also want to make sure that the piston itself isn't chipped or broken in any way. Let's get the pads off of here. It feels as though this rearward one's frozen in there. There we are. I usually like to turn the wheel a little bit so I can expose these 18-millimeter headed bolts. We're going to remove both those bolts that holds the bracket to the knuckle. I'm gonna leave that in just a little bit. Remove the other one. Grab that bracket, and remove the other bolt. There it is, friends. Now, it's time to remove the rotor. Now, it's going to be time to clean up the area on the bearing that's going to mount against the rotor. If it looks like it's got raised areas, make sure you sand it down so it looks a lot more like this. Before we go ahead and put our new rotor onto the vehicle, it's important to make sure you clean down the braking surface. More than likely, it's going to have a chemical on it, and you want to make sure you get it off.

Now, we're going to go ahead and spray down this area of the hub with some copper never-seize. Put our rotor on. And then grab one of your lug nuts and start it in so it holds the rotor so it doesn't move around. The next thing we need to do is clean up and prep our caliper bracket. To do that, we're gonna take a small pocket screwdriver, and we'll get these tins right off of here. You can also do it by hand if it's easy enough. After that, go ahead and grab onto these right here. Those are your caliper sliders. If you pull it out, you're going to notice there's a rubber boot. Just carefully try to get that off of the lip on the slider, and then you should be able to pull it out. There we are. Inspect the condition of your sliders. You can wipe them down. You want to make sure they're not rusted and pitted or have any large flakes or anything that's going to prevent them from sliding freely inside of the bracket area. These need to be able to slide nice and smooth. Once we get these cleaned up, we'll move along. Now that we have the grease off of the slider, we're going to take a nice hard look at this end over here. There should be a little lip that's supposed to catch right on that boot. If you were to spin it around, you want to make sure that there isn't any raised areas or rust along there. If there is, go ahead and chisel it out of there or use a wire brush. Whatever you have to do, you want it to be a nice, smooth surface for the boot to ride. That way there, it keeps all the moisture out.

The next thing we need to do is clean up the inside area of the caliper bracket where the slider is going to ride. You can do that with something as simple as just using some parts cleaner inside there, a little rag. See if you can clean it up. Sometimes people have a bore brush. It kind of looks like this, has, like, all these little metal tines except it's a circle. You can put it down in there, and that'll clean it out very well. The problem with using a bore brush on something like this is it's probably going to mess up this boot. You could try to get the boot off of here by pulling on this and popping it out, but getting it back in once you've done that is going to become an issue. So, unless you have a brand new boot, I wouldn't go through any of that process. I'm just gonna take a tiny bit of parts cleaner, put it inside both holes. Let it sit and do its job. Once that's sat for a little while, I'm going to take a rag, and I'll just give it a nice twist, okay? That looks nice. Take it, put it inside, and then just keep twisting it around and around and around so it's going to accumulate any of the parts cleaner that's in there, and it's also going to try to get out any of the contaminants that are in there as well. As you could tell, that's pretty nasty.

I'm going to do the same thing to the other one. Now, this next part is just about as important as actually cleaning it. You need to make sure that all the parts cleaner is dried out of there before we continue on. Once that's completely dried, we're going to take some lubricant. This is just plain old moly grease. I'm going to go right along that whole shaft of the slider. And then it's also important to make sure you get up into this area right here. That's where the boot's going to ride. By putting it up in that area, it's going to help keep moisture and debris out of there and keep the sliders functioning properly for a long time. Just go ahead and slide it in there, press it until it stops. I like to twist it around and around and around a couple of times, make sure everything's situated. Do the same to the other side. Okay. Those look great. The next thing we need to do is clean up the area where those tins are going to ride. Something that's important to remember is it's not only where the tins are gonna ride, but after the tins are on, that's also where the pads are going to be. So, if you don't clean up the raised areas that you can see flaking up here, you're going to have an issue with the pads being stuck inside the bracket, and the brakes are not going to function well, and they're going to have an issue over time. So, a couple of ways to clean it up. You can use a pocket screwdriver or a scraper, clean it up like this, try to get off at least the large flakes for now. Move along to using one of these little brushes. Clean it up. Of course, make sure you get this upper area here too by the way.

Or if you have access to it, you could use one of these. Has a nice little sanding disc. And you can go ahead and sand this down, make it nice and smooth. But if you are going to use something like this, just be careful not to take away too much of the meat of the caliper bracket. It's not the point of it to take away any of the meat. We just want to get off the excess stuff that shouldn't be there. Now that we have the bracket nice and cleaned up where those tins are going to ride, let's go ahead and add a little bit of lubricant. You don't need to add very much here. We just want to add a nice little layer that's going to help prevent moisture or anything like that from getting in between. If you end up putting too much, it could eventually squeeze out and potentially get up against the rotor/in between the pads and rotor, which would be an issue. Now that we have the caliper bracket lubricated, we're going to install the tins. If you were to look at the backside of the tins, you're going to notice you have a little hooky-do here, and then you have a strange-looking one right there. The side that looks like this, that comes out a little bit further off to the side and then comes up is going to actually go facing towards the slider or towards the rear of the bracket. Go ahead and slide that on there and then press it in. It should want to stay. Do the same to the other side. Awesome.

Now, we need to make our way back over to the vehicle. And what we're going to do is we're going to start working on the actual caliper itself. This is the muscle of the brake. If you were to look right here, you're going to see this little tin. Take a quick look at your new one in comparison to your old one. You're going to see that you can put it one of two ways. We want to make sure we're facing in the right direction. Now we're just going to get this one out of here, and we'll install the new one. Slide it in. Give it a nice press. Make sure it's completely secured. If it falls out, it's not secure. Next, it's going to be time to go ahead and push in the caliper pistons. What you'll notice if you were trying to use a tool that looks like this, which is what most people have, is you would go inside like this, squeeze in this piston. As you squeeze this one in, this one would start coming out. That could be an issue. If you're using this tool, the best way to do it would be to go ahead and take one of your old brake pads and then go ahead and grip right in the center and squeeze it down. For me personally, I have this tool right here. As you crank it, it's going to push in both these pistons at the same time. You could also use this at the same time if you wanted to. Put this in. Now, we're just going to slowly push in the pistons.

The next step for preparing this is we want to add a tiny bit of lubricant along the pistons themselves and then along each of these three ears. The reason for doing this is for vibration dampening and noise reduction. I'm gonna get the caliper bracket on. Go ahead and take your caliper bolts and use a tiny bit of threadlocker. Let's get this started. Torque this to 118 foot-pounds. Now, it's going to be time to get the brake pads onto the vehicle. What you're going to notice is you should have some wear indicators. They probably came in your little bag. You can go ahead and squeeze that right onto the pads. And you want them both facing just like this. When we install these, we want the brake indicators facing up. Let's see if I can slide this in here. It should slide in nice and easy. If you have to force it in or use a hammer for any reason, you probably didn't clean up the bracket enough. These look great. Make sure they can move around freely. Go ahead and take that caliper and slide it over. Put it right down on there. Now, we're going to grab our caliper mounting bolts. I've got our caliper bolts with a teeny bit of threadlocker. Start them in, bottom them out, and then we'll torque them down. Let's torque these to 31 foot-pounds.

It's always a great idea to double-check everything that you removed and replaced. Just make sure everything's secure and good to go. Once you've done that, let's go ahead and get the wheel up on here. Bring the vehicle down so the tire's just barely touching the ground so it can't spin. And then torque the wheels in a criss-cross manner to 103 foot-pounds. Now it's going to be time to get our center cover on here. If you were to turn it around, you might see something that looks a lot like a valve stem. Line it up with your valve stem, and then go ahead and pop it on there. All right. Now, I know you think you're done, but you still need to pump up the brake pedal, and then we're gonna go out there and double-check that brake fluid level. Right underneath the hood, you're going to see your master cylinder. It'll tell you what type of fluid to use. You can give it a little shake and just double-check to make sure you can see it's up at that maximum line.

Okay, friends. One of the first things we need to do is safely raise and support the vehicle so your wheel's off the ground. Once you've done that, we're gonna come right here to your center cover, use a nice little pry bar and go ahead and pop this off. Now that we've done that, we're gonna remove all 6 of our 19-millimeter lug nuts and take the wheel off. Now that the wheels off of here, we're gonna go ahead and take this caliper off of the bracket. To do that, use your 17-millimeter and hold on to this area right here. That's the caliper slider. On the other side, you're gonna find a 14-millimeter bolt. All right. There we are. That one loose, do the same to the other one. Take the caliper off and quickly inspect it. What I mean by that is looking right along this rubber boot right here, and make sure you don't see any fluid. If you see fluid coming out of here, you have a caliper issue, and it needs to be either serviced or replaced. This one looks fine, so let's set it aside and move along. Now it's gonna be time to get the pads out of here. You might notice that they're frozen inside the bracket. Obviously, that's gonna be an issue. Take a nice punch chisel, whatever you might have, even a pry bar and just get the pads out, and then, of course, we'll recycle them.

Moving along, we're gonna remove the 18-millimeter head bolts that hold the caliper bracket to the differential. There it is, friends. Next, it's gonna be time to get the rotor off of there. Sometimes what you might notice is the rotors might have these little clips that are supposed to be holding the rotor on there. A lot of times you can either just pull them off. You might have to pry them off or even grab them with some cutters. Go ahead and grab onto that rotor. Give it a wiggle and remove it. Now that we have that off of there, it's a good idea to take a quick look around. You wanna double-check your e-brake shoes. That's these right here. You also want to take a peek behind there and make sure that you don't have any leaks of any sort. Assuming everything's good, we're gonna go ahead and clean up the mating surface where the rotor is gonna ride. Now that we have the majority of this cleaned up, it's important to make sure you get along the areas in between the studs and the hub area. Now we're gonna be using a little bit of chemicals, so you wanna make sure you have a collection bucket and some parts cleaner. Let's clean this down. Before we go ahead and install our rotor onto the vehicle, it's important to make sure that you clean all the braking surfaces.

The reason for that is because it's gonna have a chemical that's put on there during shipping to prevent rust or damage of any sort. Okay. So now, before we go ahead and start spraying this down with any copper Never-Seez, we wanna take our brand-new rotor, right here, slide it on, and we wanna gauge to see how far we need to adjust the emergency brake. It's always a good idea to try to adjust your emergency brake. To do that, if you were to come from the back side with your screwdriver, come in between where the lever is, right behind here, and then I'm just gonna try to pry like as if I'm pulling on that emergency brake. Then I'm gonna try to spin that rotor. What we wanna do is make it so it doesn't spin when you pull on this, but when you let go, it needs to be able to spin without any drag. This area right here with the knurls is the area where you'd adjust. If I was to go right here and lift up, that's gonna de-adjust, and if I was to go right here and bring it around clockwise, that's gonna adjust it out a little bit and make it tighter. Now going with the assumption you have your emergency brake adjusted up the way it needs to be, let's go ahead and put on a little bit of copper Never-Seez on the mating surface where the rotor's gonna ride. Put the rotor on there and start on one of your lug nuts.

Now we've made our way over to the bench with our caliper bracket. The reason for that is because we need to strip it down and clean it up. Let's take a small pocket screwdriver, get right in between here, and take these tins off. We'll set these tins aside for recycling. Next we're gonna remove the slider. You might need to use a small pocket screwdriver just to peel it up and away from the area that it's stuck on to. Pull that right out of there. Set it aside. Do the same to the other one. Okay. Now we're gonna remove the slider boot. Should come right off. Just give it a quick check-over. Make sure it's not worn or torn in any way. Do the same to the other one. I like to clean them up, of course. Set those aside. Now we're gonna put a little bit of cleaner inside here. Just be careful because when you spray stuff in, stuff always comes out. You could use a boar brush of some sort or some kind of wire brush and try to clean it out inside, or, of course, you can just use a rag. It doesn't have to be anything special. Give it a nice twist. Stick it inside there, and twist as you keep going in. Okay. Go and pull it out. It looks pretty nasty. Look inside. Make sure it looks nice and clean. If it looks like it's pitted or it's in any way gonna cause an issue with the slider, you're gonna need to continue on.

I'm gonna do the same to the other side here. One last thing before we move along, you wanna look down along this area right here where that boot's gonna ride. Make sure that there's no crowd or anything like that that's gonna cause an issue for sealing of the boot. If there's an area that moisture can get in, obviously, it's gonna cause an issue internally. Let's move along to cleaning up the sliders. Get off any of the gunk that might be on there. As you clean them up, you wanna inspect the slider. Make sure it's not rusted or pitted or anything. If there's some sort of issue that might cause a binding issue, you're gonna wanna take care of it now. Also, when you're cleaning, look at this ridge right here. That's also another area that that slider boot's gonna ride. It needs to be clean as well. Let's just open up that boot, take our rag, and then just clean up the inside as well. Close it back up. We'll do the same to the other one. Now it's gonna be time to clean up the area on the bracket where those tins are gonna be. You wanna clean up this area right along here and, of course, either of these sides. To do that, you could use your small pocket screwdriver.

You could use a scraper of some sort, a nice wire brush, or if you have one of these nice sanding tools right here, you could try to clean it up. One thing to mention if you're using something like this, be careful not to take off too much of the metal of the actual caliper bracket itself because then you'll get pad slap noises. Next thing we wanna do is use a little bit of Moly grease. This is just plain old caliper grease, and it's nothing special. The reason for using a little bit of grease on here is for vibration dampening, noise reduction, and it also keeps moisture out so rust doesn't build up again. Now that we have those nice and lubed up, let's go ahead and put on these tins. Should just slide right in there. Clip in so they're nice and secure. Make sure it doesn't fall off. Do the same to the other side. Perfect. Next it's gonna be time to get our caliper slider boots back on here. Before we go ahead and slap them on there, we wanna make sure that there's a nice little bit of lubricant going along that little edge that I told you to clean out. That's gonna help keep moisture out of there which is super important. Take your caliper slider boot here, pop it on there and give it a couple good twists. That's gonna make sure that everything's nice and lubricated. Next we're gonna take our caliper slider pin.

We're gonna lubricate the long part of it here, and then you also wanna make sure you get up into this groove. There we are. That's a decent amount. We'll slide it in there. Give it a nice twist. Make sure everything's nice and situated. Do the same to the other one. Slide it right on in there. A couple twists. Let's get back over to the vehicle. It's important to make sure that we clean up any of this old threadlocker that's on our bolts because we need to put on some new. Now with those bolts nice and cleaned up, we've put a little bit of threadlocker on there, we've got our caliper bracket, let's get it back on the vehicle. Once you bottom them out, go ahead and torque them to 148 foot-pounds. Now it's gonna be time to get our brake pads in the vehicle. You're gonna notice that two of the pads out of the set are gonna have this wear indicator right here. The pad with the wear indicator needs to be on the inside, and it also needs to be facing upward. Okay. I've got that one in there. You definitely wanna make sure that it's not to the point where you have to hammer it in. It needs to be able to slide around a little bit, okay? Do the same to the outer pad. There we are. Slides around. Slides around. It's gonna be time to push in our caliper piston.

Some people like to open up their bleeder screw, but what you might find is if you open up the bleeder screw, it might break off. So, if you don't wanna deal with that, you could just try to push it in but just push it in slowly. There we are. That looks great. Now we just need to add a little bit of that caliper lubricant here. When you're applying the caliper lubricant, I like to go right around the metal part of the piston and then on each of the ears of the caliper. You don't need to go anywhere else. Slide it right over the pads and the sliders and then go ahead and grab on to your bolts. Got our caliper bolts. I used a little bit of threadlocker on it because that's how I roll. We're gonna bottom these out. Torque these to 23 foot-pounds. All right. Let's get the wheel up on here. Start on all your lug nuts, bottom them out, and then we'll torque them to 103 foot-pounds. Let's torque these in a crisscross manner. Now it's gonna be time to put on your center cover. If you were to look at the back side, you're gonna see something that looks a lot like a valve stem. Line that up with your valve stem then just give it a nice loving bonk. Make sure it's completely secured.

All right. Now I know you think you're done, but you still need to pump up the brake pedal, and then we're gonna go out there and double-check that brake fluid level. Right underneath the hood, you're gonna see your master cylinder. It'll tell you what type of fluid to use. You can give it a little shake and just double-check to make sure you can see it's up at that maximum line.