2011 Acura ZDX Rear Ceramic Performance Brake Pad & Rotor Kit TRQ Performance BKA12343

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The first step in doing a brake job is to remove the wheel. And to remove the wheel, we want to crack these lug nuts loose before we jack it up and that way. It will make it a little easier on us with the car in the air. We'll use a 22 mm socket and a 1/2 inch drive ratchet to get them loose. You can use your jack and jack stands to raise this vehicle off the ground in a driveway or garage. In our case, we happen to have a vehicle lift to make the video shooting a little easier, so we're going to go ahead and use that. We can now take our deep 22 mm socket and we can remove each of the lug nuts just by spinning them off. You probably won't need to use a ratchet for this, because once you've got them loose, they usually spin off pretty easily. Now we can take the wheel off of the vehicle.

We're now going to remove the caliper from the caliper bracket and there's two bolts. There's one on the top, and one on the bottom. And they're both 12mm bolts. So, we're going to use a 12 mm wrench to remove them. Once you crack them loose, you should be able to just spin it right out with your fingers. There's one, and we'll do the bottom one just like that. We'll spin it right out.

Now, to get the caliper off, it's a little bit sticky on there, so what I like to do is hang off of it a little bit and that pushes the piston back into the caliper and then it will slide right off. At this point, we need to come up with a bungee cord that we can hang this from. Maybe from the shock tower and that will prevent us from damaging the brake hose back here. You never want to hang the caliper from the brake hose, because you can easily damage the brake hose. All right. Here's our bungee cord and we're just going to snake the bungee cord right through here and hang the caliper right from the shock.

Now we can pull the pads out and have a look at them. You can use a flat tip screwdriver to get them out. These ones, you can see, they're probably halfway worn out. We're actually replacing this because it has a pretty bad brake pulsation. Now we're going to remove the brake caliper bracket and that is a 17mm bolt right here and a 17mm bolt right here. I'm going to just try and use a wrench. These bolts are usually pretty tight, but with a little muscling, you should be able to get them off. There's the lower bolt. A lot of the time, these will just spin out really easily. You can certainly use a 17mm socket and take this off a little faster. All right. There's the second bolt.

This is the caliper bracket and we need to clean the mud and the dirt and the brake dust off of it. You can use brake cleaner and a wire brush to clean all the slides out here. We have a parts washing tank, so I'm actually just going to use the parts washing tank. But, ideally, you just want to clean off all the mud, make sure it's a nice, clean environment for your brake pads to live in.

The next thing that we have to do is pull this Phillips-head screw out of the rotor and the Phillips-head screws right here are usually stuck really hard, unless the car is new. So, we're going to give it a shot. Oh wow. This one actually came out ridiculously easily, which is unheard of. Usually if these things are stuck, you need to use a impact driver, which is just a screwdriver that you put into the screw and then you whack it with a hammer and it puts extra force on it and it turns it at the same time and that makes pulling these brake rotor bolts out really, really easy. Far easier than using a screwdriver, because a screwdriver will end up stripping the bolt out. Some miracle happened with us today and we got the bolt out with just a regular screwdriver. But, if the car was 10 years older, you would definitely need some sort of impact driver for it.

Honda puts these bolt holes in their rotors so that you can put bolts in them and when you put bolts in them. It actually pries the rotor off of the hub. These bolts are M8 x 1.25 thread pitch. And you just screw them in and as you tighten them in, it pushes against the hub and it pulls it off. You can see it coming away from the hub right here. However, the other thing you have to watch out for here is the parking brake. So, the parking brake is inside this drum and a lot of the time, the parking brake will be too far out and it will grab on to the rotor as you're trying to pull it off. So, we'll give it a shot and it looks like ours came right off. However, if it didn't, what you can do is you can pull this out with a flat-tip screwdriver, like so.

This is just a rubber plug to keep water out of the rear parking brake. And what you do is you have to find the adjuster wheel on the parking brake and then you use a flat-tip screwdriver to adjust it, and when you adjust the parking brake adjuster, it will bring the brake shoes in and it will allow you to pull the rotor off. I'm going to take the rotor off and I'll show you how it works.

You'll see that the rotor has a hole in it now, that had the rubber plug. And what you do is you insert a flat-tip screwdriver through that hole and you can actually turn this adjuster wheel by prying on it. Going like this will actually loosen up the brakes, and that will allow you to pull the brake rotor off of the parking brake. Going like this will loosen up the parking brake. It will bring them very close together, and then you can slide the rotor off.

Here we have our old rotor and our old pads, and we have our new rotor and new pads. You can see they essentially look identical. This one had a pretty bad pulsation, probably caused by the vehicle sitting for a little while and then having some rust marks on the rotor. You can see the pads are identical as well. Comes with a squeaker, just like the old one. They look the same, fit the same, and obviously work the same. And the new rotor also has all the right spots. It has the holes to pull the rotor off of the hub. It has the bolt hole right here to bolt it onto the hub and obviously, the same bolt pattern. These parts should look and work and fit just like the originals.

All right. Here we have our new rotor and what we want to do is make sure that this bolt hole and these little marks where the other bolt holes were all line up with the new rotor. So, what we'll do is we'll find that spot. Looks like it's like this. Yep. And we'll slide it on.

If you go like this, you can actually hear the parking brake shoes just barely touching the insides of the rotor, so we may need to adjust them down a little bit. With a new rotor, it looks like the new rotor is not worn out, which is good, so we're going to adjust them down a little bit and give them a little more distance between the rotor and the shoes so that we can have a properly working parking brake with no drag. We're going to pull that off. You can do this with the rotor installed, but I just have the rotor off so I can show you how this works. You basically take a flat screwdriver and you can pry down on this adjuster wheel. You can see the gap right here is getting smaller as I spin this. And that means that the parking brake shoes are coming closer together and giving a little bit more space under the rotor. We're going to set it maybe about there and we'll put the rotor back on, obviously finding the right position for it once again. Like that. It's definitely a little bit better. We'll probably give it a couple more clicks and we'll do it from right here. This is how you would normally do it.

All right. So, now it's very lightly touching and that's exactly what you want. You want it to spin freely, but also just barely hear the brake shoes touching the rotor, so it's free to move but still just barely there. All right. Now we're going to put our Phillips-head screw into the rotor and tighten it up. You want to hold the rotor flat as you tighten it and we want to put our rubber cap back in this little hole here. It's a little easier when you're not wearing rubber gloves. Flat-tip screwdriver will probably help. There we are.

You'll see that we have all kinds of greasy fingerprints and some shipping grease all over the rotor. We don't want to get that stuck in the pads, so what we're going to do is spray it with some brake cleaner and wipe it off with a clean rag. That way it will be a nice, clean surface for the pads to ride on when we get it all put together. We're going to do the same for the back side.

Here's our brake caliper. We cleaned all the mud off of it. You want to make sure your sliders move freely. Ours actually work really well. If they don't, you can grab the boot and pull it out. When you pull this out, if yours are stuck in there, you're going to want to clean them out with some brake cleaner, maybe even a wire brush and then put a really thin coat of grease on the slider and then push it back in.

If you put too much grease in it, it will actually prevent the slider from collapsing all the way, and you don't want that to happen because that will wear out your brake pads unevenly. We know that ours are in good shape. They slide perfectly, so we're going to put them back on with our 17mm bolts. I'll do the top one first as always, start it by hand. And we'll do the lower one. And then we can tighten them up with our wrench or a socket and ratchet, whatever your preference is. I'm using a wrench because it happens to be in my hand.

Now we're going to put a little anti-seize on the edge of the brake pad, so that it slides into the caliper nice and smooth. We'll put it right here, just on the top and the bottom. You don't want to get it on the actual brake pad surface, because then you'll obviously have poorly working brake pads. Then you can slide them right in to their new home in the caliper, just like that. You put the squeaky one on the back side and then the one without the squeaker on the outer side.

Now we're going to use a C-clamp to compress the piston in the caliper. We can do this with it still hanging. We just need to put the piston back into the caliper so that we can slide the caliper over the new pads. This is easy as just turning this and you can turn it right back out again like so. And pull your C-clamp off and at that point, you can take off your bungee cord and set that aside. You don't want to accidentally leave it attached to your shock. It looks like the boot in this caliper is actually poking out a bit, so I'm going to poke the boot back into place. There we go.


All right. Now we can slide the whole thing right onto the brake caliper bracket and we can install our two bolts. All right. Here's our two 12mm bolts. We're going to screw them in by hand and then use our 12 mm wrench to tighten them up.

Whenever you do a brake job, you always want to pump the brake pedal at the end of the repair and that's because there's all this extra space between the piston and the caliper and the brake pads and when you push the brake pedal down, it basically forces the piston all the way out and that's basically its new home. Right now it's all the way backed into the caliper and that's basically its innermost point. So, what it does is when you push the pedal down, the piston comes out and it basically takes up all that free space. You only need to do it a couple times, because then it finds its new normal and at that point, your pedal becomes a much firmer feel.

If you forgot to pump your brake pedal after doing a brake job, it would take a few full presses of the pedal to get all of the pistons out to their new normal and it would actually end up scaring you quite a bit and may even cause an accident, because you'll end up having basically no brakes for the first couple of pumps of the pedal. As soon as you get the pedal pumped up, then everything becomes normal, and you can drive around and stop a whole lot safer than before.

At this point, we can put our wheel back on. We'll lift it up, pretend we're really strong and slide it on the car. Then, you can start threading your lug nuts on one at a time. I always like to do the top one first and then I'll push the wheel in and do the bottom. If you get the bottom one in, it makes the other three pretty easy. Just like that. Because now the lugs are sticking out. We can now begin tightening up these 22 mm lug nuts. We'll use a ratchet to get them snugged up. You want to get them snug while the car is still in the air and then once it's on the ground, you can torque them to the proper specifications. All right. It's now time to lower the vehicle back down to the ground. We'll come back over here with our 22 mm socket and our torque wrench and we'll torque this to 94 foot-pounds.

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