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Hi, I'm Mike from 1AAuto. We've been selling auto parts for over 30 years! We're dedicated to delivering quality auto parts, expert customer service, and fast and free shipping, all backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee. We've created thousands of videos to help you install our parts with confidence. That saves you time and money, so visit us at 1AAuto.com, your trusted source for quality auto parts.
In this video, we're going to be working with our 2012 GMC Acadia. We're going to be showing you how to remove and replace your front brakes. We're doing this on the passenger side, but the process will be the same on the driver's side. We always recommend you replace these in a pair, as well as wearing a dust mask when you're working on it, as the old pads are going to be full of rust and corrosion and brake dust that you don't want to breathe in while you're working.
If you like this video, please click subscribe. We have a ton more information on this and many other vehicles. If you need these parts for your car, you can follow the link down in the description over to 1AAuto.com.
Here are the items you'll need for this repair: 13-22mm socket, wrenches, ratchet, socket extension, breaker bar, pry bar, torque wrench, T30 Torx bit, flat head screwdriver, hammer, wire brush, groovelock pliers, brake cleaner, grease, bungee cord, jack and jack stands, gloves, dust mask, and safety glasses.
Loosen your lug nuts using a twenty-two millimeter deep socket and a breaker bar. Raise and support your vehicle. You can do this with a jack and jack stands at home, but we're going to put it up on a lift to make it easier to show. Once you have your vehicle in the air, you can finish removing your lug nuts. Remove the wheel and tire.
Brace your lug studs with a pry bar so we can turn a rotor screw out with a T30 Torx bit and a ratchet. Once you get it cracked loose, you should be able to take that pry bar out of the way and just spin the rest out nice and easy. Now this screw isn't critical to how your brakes function, it's just designed to hold the rotor upright while we work on the rest of the brake components. It is nice to have, so be sure to keep it close.
Using a 13mm socket and a ratchet, we'll remove the two caliper slide bolts on the back of the caliper. Be sure to loosen both of them before removing either one fully, or when you go to turn the other one, you can cause the caliper to twist around and it makes it a lot more difficult to remove. Keep a hand on there when you take the last bolt out so it doesn't fall and risk tearing that brake line. Work the caliper off, and using a bungee cord, mechanic's wire, or a zip tie, go ahead and secure the caliper up and out of the way.
Go ahead and pull the brake pads out. You may find this to go a little easier with the help of a small, flat blade screwdriver. We're going to use a 21mm socket and a breaker bar to break these caliper bracket bolts here loose. Again, this is another bolt that you're going to want to make sure you get both of them cracked loose before you remove either one fully. Otherwise, when we were to try to crack this loose with the top out, the whole caliper bracket would roll out and make it more difficult to remove. We'll go ahead and switch over to a 21mm socket and ratchet. Remove the caliper bracket from the spindle.
Now, our rotor isn't going to just pull off. What you can do is: if you aren't going to save the rotor, which we don't recommend you do anytime you change the brake pads. We recommend you do the rotors as well because you can see we have this rust buildup here. While you can get them machined, that usually brings them down so close to the factory limit that they get hot and warp more easily. If you are changing your rotors, you can hit it forward right on the rotor surface to break the rust loose. If you want to save them for some reason, you can hit here, very careful not to hit the studs, to release the rust.
Here we have our old parts that we removed from our vehicle, and our new parts from 1AAuto.com. As you can see, these parts are exactly the same. We have the same six lug bolt pattern on our rotors. We have the same beveled hole here for our rotor screw. The brake pads are exactly the same size and shape. We even have a new audible pad indicator here, or a brake squealer, which is going to hit your rotor when your pads start to wear down to the point that it's time to change them. That will start to squeak against the rotor and give you an audible heads-up that it's time to get a brake service. The rotors are the same thickness. These actually are a little bit thicker, because they haven't been worn down like the old ones have here.
It's still a nice vented rotor, which is going to help dissipate the heat generated when braking. They're the same on the backside as well. If your old brakes are worn out, glazed, squealing, grinding, or you have rust buildup, or a warped rotor causing a vibration in the pedal, these new parts from 1A Auto are going to go in direct fit, just like your original equipment. Get your vehicle stopping short and safe, just like it should, and fix you up right.
Again, anytime that you're going to be doing something that kicks up dust and debris when working on a vehicle, we recommend you wear a dust mask. Now, this hub isn't too bad, but we always clean them just to make sure that everything's nice when we put our new parts on. Use a steel wire brush to remove all that dirt and debris, all this rust buildup from the hub, so we can put a coat of grease on there and make sure we don't have to fight our rotor off on our next brake job, like we just had to here. Once you've removed all the debris from your hub surface, go ahead and apply a thin coat of grease to the flat portion and around the center bore here to make sure that we don't have anymore corrosion buildup, and that our rotors come right off by hand next time we have to do our brakes.
You always want to clean your brake caliper carrier whenever you take it off. Make sure it gets some nice, fresh grease on it to remove any old corrosion and buildup that's going to make our new brake parts not work smoothly. All we got to do here is peel the boot back off of the slide. Take the slide out. Wipe the old grease off with a paper towel or a clean rag. Give it a quick check that there are no nicks or burrs anywhere on it, no rust buildup. Just nice and clean and smooth. Just take a little bit of brake grease, dab on our finger. We’ll just apply a thin layer of that nice, new grease onto our slide to make sure it keeps the moisture and corrosion out, and keeps our new pads and caliper moving nice and smooth. Once that's done, we'll reinstall it into our caliper carrier, and push it in so the boot pops back on, and do the same thing to the other side. Now we'll take our brake hardware off here.
This is just a shim, or an insulator as they call it sometimes, to keep the pad from making noise while it moves. Keep it in there nice and tight. Pop that off. Again, with our steel wire brush, we'll just get in there and remove any corrosion and buildup. Now we will not grease this portion of it. We will take our slide, and this one's not bad, so we can just clean this up with a brush. These are really rusted or cracked anywhere, you can replace them. As long as they clean up nicely, looks like this one will, you can just go ahead and take all that off with your brush.
Once you get all of that buildup off of there, and it is okay to have a little bit, you just want to make sure you get the bulk of it off. We'll go ahead and snap it back into our caliper bracket. Then we'll repeat these steps on the opposite side. Now some people like to grease the slides directly, but I think it's a lot more efficient and a lot neater to grease the pad before we install it into the slides. If you want to do it this way, then just put a little grease on your finger and apply it to the contact surfaces on your slides. Or, when we install our pads, you can do the same thing and just grease the bottom part where it's actually going to contact this metal.
Install your rotor onto the hub backwards. Spray down the contact surface with some brake cleaner. These rotors are stored with a compound called Cosmoline on them to keep them from corroding from the factory. It's slippery, so if you leave it on there your car's not going to brake well until you've burned it all off. Once we've cleaned that side, we'll flip it over. Be sure to line up that beveled hole with the threaded hole here for our rotor screw. Reinstall our rotor the right way, and spray off this surface as well. As I was saying earlier, the rotor screw is not critical to the operation of your brakes. If you've broken it or lost it, it's not the end of the world. However, you can see our rotor hangs on an angle here, which means when we go to install our caliper carrier, our brake pads, and eventually our caliper, this little bit of angle is going to cause us some headache putting it back together. We'll push it back on flat, and with our T30 Torx socket and ratchet, we'll reinstall that screw into our rotor. Now it sits on there nice and flat and straight. It'll make our reassembly go that much smoother.
Reinstall your brake caliper carrier and start your two 21mm bolts in by hand. Tighten them down with your 21mm socket and ratchet. Torque these bolts to 129 foot-pounds. If you didn't grease your slides earlier, grease the ears of your brake pads where they're going to contact the slides. Just a little bit is fine. Then install them into the slides on your caliper carrier.
Using a pair of groove jaw pliers, C-clamps, or a proper brake piston compressor tool, slowly compress the piston back into the caliper. If you do this too fast, you'll see the other one start moving. If it moves too far, you'll actually push it out of the caliper, which makes a big mess and it means we're going to have to bleed our brakes and add a whole lot of trouble to this job. Bring them down until they're all the way flush. If you go too fast, you may have to go back and forth a couple of times just to make sure that both pistons are fully seated before we try to install them over the pads.
Don't forget to apply a thin coat of grease to the back of your pads before installing your caliper. Remove whatever you used to secure your caliper up and out of the way. Make sure that your flex hose is not twisted or kinked anywhere. Reinstall your caliper over the slides, and your two 13mm bolts into the slides. Tighten these up with your 13mm socket and ratchet. Torque the guide pin bolts to 47 foot-pounds.
Reinstall your wheel and tire. Get your lug nuts on as tight as you can. The right way to torque a six lug wheel is to make little triangles, so we'll go like this. We'll go across the wheel, and then we'll make another little triangle this way.
Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.
Tools used
Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!
With the vehicle on the ground, I'm going to use a breaker bar and a 22 millimeter socket to loosen the lug nuts. Raise and support your vehicle with a jack and jack stands. We're using our two-post lift. Use the socket to finish removing the lug nuts. Take a couple of lug nuts and just thread them on lightly. Use a dead blow or a rubber mallet, hit on the tire. It'll knock it free. The lug nuts will keep the wheel from falling off. Now it's loose. See. Finish taking the lug nuts off. It's going to support it so doesn't fall.
Let me grab the hub and knuckle and just turn it out this way so it's a little easier to see what I'm doing. Take a large flat bladed screwdriver and kind of wedge it in here. We're going to pull the brake caliper out and press the pistons. This way when I go to remove the caliper slide bolts, the caliper will come off the pistons easier.
There's 13 millimeter bolts on the bottom and the top, going to remove these using a 13 millimeter box wrench and break them free. Put these bolts aside to reuse them. Slide the caliper off. Just rest it like that. Grab a bungee cord. That gets it right there. I just don't want it to hang on this rubber hose. You can damage it.
Our brake pads, pretty well worn, just kind of slide them out of the hardware. If they don't want to come out that easily, you can just use the flat blade screwdriver to pop them out. I'm not worried about damaging the surface of them because I'm going to replace them. We need to remove the bottom and top caliper mounting bolts. They are 21 millimeter. I'm using a large ratchet to break them free. Before I take that one all the way out, break this one free. I'll hold on the bracket, take the bolt out, and pull the whole bracket out.
You need to remove the screw that's holding the rotor to the hub. It's a T-30 Torx bit. Pull that out. Reuse it. See if this comes free. Nope, rusted there. Let's spray some rust penetrant in here, a little bit in here, and try to work it down between the rotor and the hub. It can go around the wheel studs. Thread on the lug nut. I don't want the rotor to fall, but not all the way. I want to have it so it has some space to move, and I'll take a dead blow and just knock the rotor. It might take one hit, could take a bunch of hits. You just got to do it till it comes free. We're replacing these rotors, so I'm not too worried about damaging them.
Here's our original pad rotors from our vehicle and our brand new ones from 1aauto.com. They're an exact match for the originals. You can see how worn out these are compared to the new ones. They've got the same wear indicator in them, same bolt pattern, and same screw hole opening. These will fit great and work great on our vehicle. Then clean and reuse our caliper hardware, it's stainless and just needs to be cleaned up.
Use some brake parts cleaner, a wire brush, and a rag. You can also check your slide pins to make sure they're operating. They should pull out with some resistance but move in and out nice and smoothly. These ones do. We're going to leave them alone. No need to take them out and grease them. Just take some brake parts cleaner. Spray it down. Use a wire brush. Then also clean it down with a rag. Do the same for both sides. We could reuse our caliper mounting bolts. We just need to clean off the old thread locker, so I'm going to use some brake parts cleaner. Spray it down, and the wire brush, clean up both of them. Just make sure you get it all off of there.
If you have access to it, you can use a 14 by two thread dye. And we'll thread this in here and we'll clean the threads out. But the other method, you can just use a wire brush. That should thread in pretty easily. You may need to put a sock on it, but it will clean all the junk out of the threads. That's our old thread locker out of there. You can see it's all in the dye now. Put the rotor on backwards. Clean down the oil that they're packed in so they don't flash rust. Use brake parts cleaner. Wipe off any excess from the rag. Put the rotor over.
If your hub was extremely rusty, now it would be the time to clean it. Take a wire brush and clean this all off. This one's in good shape. I'm going to leave it alone. Now I'll line up the threaded hole here with the opening in the rotor. That's for the retention screw. That right in place. Install the screw. Just tighten it down. It's not a lot of torque. It's just to hold the rotor in place while you work. Then clean out the front of the rotor.
Same thing, it's packaged with the oil to prevent it from flash rusting. Before I reinstall the bracket, I'm going to take some medium strength threadlocker and apply it to the threads of the caliper bracket bolts. Do this to both of them. Reinstall the bracket. Get it lined up. I'm going to get the top one caught first. I may need to move the bracket around, thread it in my hand. We can use a socket to tighten it down. Then torque the caliper bracket bolts to 129 foot-pounds. When it clicks, you've reached the correct torque.
Make sure that the brake pad surface is nice and clean, has no grease or dirt on it. Just going to give it a light spray with some brake parts cleaner, don't need to soak it. Apply some brake caliper grease to the ears. The brake pad with the wear indicator will go on the inside. The outside curve will match the outside curve of the rotor. Switch hands here. I'm going to slide it right into the clips. Just pull them into place. Do the same thing for the other pad.
I'm using a large C-clamp and an old brake pad. We need to compress the two pistons back into the caliper. You don't need to crack the bleeder screw. We don't need to remove the brake line. You may have some fluid come out at the master cylinder because if there's too much fluid in the system, it has come down to fill up the extra space that is left by having these pistons this far out and these pads worn down.
You may have to go up and take some out of the master cylinder, or you'll have some spill out and you'll just have to clean it up. We're going to compress this in, just turn. I've taken it off of the bungee cord. I'm just going to gently turn this in. Little by little these pistons will start to retract. The reasons why we have to compress these pistons because these new pads are a lot thicker and you won't be able to get the caliper back on if the pistons are all the way out.
You can also see these are going in nice and easy. That tells me the caliper's in good shape and the pistons aren't seized. The pad is starting to get down. I can see the seals are starting to squish out. That's about as far as I need to go. I don't need to go all the way in, so I'm going to remove this. Put that aside and clamp out of here. Don't forget your bungee cord that's hanging on the suspension. Get rid of that.
The caliper can go back on to the bracket. The slide pins do have a flat spot. It's going to match the flat spot on the calipers. You need to turn them, both the top and the bottom. Don't look so good. That will sit in place. Reinstall the bolts. Torque the caliper slide pin bolts to 47 foot-pounds. Once it clicks, it's exactly where it needs to be. You don't need to go any further.
Start the lug nuts by hand. I'm going to use the socket, thread these down, re-torque them. Put the vehicle on the ground. Torque the lug nuts in a cross pattern to 140 foot-pounds. Before you start, move the vehicle. Gently press on the brake pedal. This will bring the caliper, the cylinders out that we've compressed to meet the pads, and you'll feel it start to build up pressure. You don't need to smash it to the floor. Just gently pump it until it builds up pressure, just like that.
Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.
