How To Replace Front Brakes 1990-97 Honda Accord
Created on: 2010-09-14
Replace squeaky, old, or faded front brakes with the help of the 1A mechanics in this helpful how-to video
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step 1 :Removing the Wheel
- Remove center cap
- While your car is still on the ground, use your 21mm socket to loosen your lug nuts
- Jack up and secure your car with jack stands
- Remove the lug nuts with your 21mm socket and ratchet
- Remove the wheel and set aside
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step 2 :Removing the Calipers
- Remove the 14mm bolts to remove the calipers
- Use a wire tie to fasten the caliper out of the way
- Use your 17mm socket and ratchet to remove your caliper brackets
- Pop out your brake pads
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step 3 :Install New Pads
- Check your caliper pins to make sure they are in good working order
- Put your caliper bracket back on, and tighten the 17mm bolts to 70 ft lbs
- Insert your new pads into the brackets
- Use your C-clamp or caliper tool to compress your caliper
- Place your caliper onto the bracket
- Tighten your 14mm bolts
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step 4 :Replacing the Wheel
- Make sure to use a star pattern when putting your wheel lugs back on
- Tighten to 75-85 ft lbs
- Replace center cap
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step 5 :Testing the Brakes
- Before driving the car again, start it up and pump the brakes a few times to get the pistons in the brakes in place
- Test the brakes in your driveway before taking the car onto the road
Tools needed
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21mm Socket
Large C-Clamp
Flat Blade Screwdriver
Torque Wrench
14mm Socket
17mm Socket
Jack Stands
Lug Wrench
Ratchet
Floor Jack
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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 or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20 plus year 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'll be replacing the front brake pads on this '95 Accord, same as any '94 to '97 Accord. Tools you'll need are a flat blade screwdriver, 14 mm, 17 mm, and 18 mm sockets with ratchet, and a large C-clamp, and obviously jack and jack stands.
Start on these aluminum wheels by removing the center cap. Next, if you don't have the benefit of air tools you want to loosen your lug nuts while your car is still on the ground, and then after you loosen the lug nuts jack it up and support it. You always want use a jack and you want to use a jack stand. Then, remove the lug nuts and the wheel. These are 18 mm bolts.
Now we have the tire off and you can see I've turned the wheels all the way to the right. Now to remove the caliper you want to remove four bolts, one, two, and then inside here these larger bolts. This one up here, three, and then its counterpart right down here, four. These two bolts are 14 mm. They actually hold the caliper to this larger bracket. The other two bolts are larger. They're 17 mm on this car. After you remove the larger bolts, now your whole assembly will come off the rotor. Here's your whole caliper assembly and here are your pads. You can take this large bracket off your caliper. Put your caliper up there, and then your pads just come right out.
Once you've removed your caliper and your pads, you want to determine if you can reuse your rotors. There're three ways. There's the technical way which is you measure how thick they are, and I will if your rotors look very crusty and old I'd just replace them. You can see on these rotors they're actually off the market set of rotors. They look pretty good. They don't look worn down. I can take my finger and run it across and I don't feel any deep gouges or grooves. I just feel very fine like vinyl record type grooves in it. You want to check both the face of it and the backside as well. These rotors are fine. I'm going to reuse them. If you feel like you need to replace your rotor you're going to want to check out our other videos. Changing the rotors on these cars require some more advanced tools and requires taking apart of the steering knuckle. For this video we're going to go back to showing you how to put the pads back on.
You're going to want to take your big bolts, slide it in behind. Get the bolts started. Now we'll take those 17 mm bolts up. They probably should be about 70 foot pounds. I'm just using a nice big half-inch ratchet and pulling good and hard. Now these brake pads are actually fine. They have a lot of life left on. You do want to make sure you check the other side as well, which I did on this car, and both sides the brake pads the wear was nice and even. There can be times where one side will look fine and then the other side is worn down more, and you always want to replace sides at the same time.
This tab here is your wear tab. You want to make sure you put this pad on the backside with the wear tab facing up. That's when your pads start to wear out that tab is going to start making that squeaking noise so you know that you need to replace your brakes, that one in and this one. Now if you're replacing your pads with new pads, your caliper, this piston is going to work its way out. What you want to use is a large C-clamp. Now as I tighten you can see that the piston will go back in to the caliper. You need to work the piston all the way back in in order to get it down over the new brake pads. Now with your caliper back, we can just put it all right on and your bolts. These are 14 mm bolts. I'm just going to tighten them up a little bit with my air wrench here. Now I'm going to use my hand ratchet to tighten them up the rest of the way so I know how tight they are. Never want to use an impact wrench to tighten bolts like that because what you can end up doing is breaking those bolts, and obviously on a brake system you don't want any broken bolts. We put the wheel back on. Again, I'm just going to use my impact wrench to tighten them up a little bit.
Once you have the car down on the ground, use a nice big wrench, and then generally lug nuts you want to tighten up between 75 and 85 foot pounds. I usually just use a breaker bar and get them tight. Take your cap put it back on. Very important, you want to pump your brakes a bunch of times before you test drive because when you have pushed the pistons back into the calipers it'll take a few presses of the brakes for the pistons to work their way out enough to make the brakes effective. You want to pump your brakes a bunch of times, and then just be very careful when you first test drive the car because on the first few times you use your brakes the brakes might not work exactly great until the pistons have worked their way back out.
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.
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