Brake Pad Replacement Questions

[JAJ]

Update : I put the wheels back now. I drove the car around and there are no issues or noises.

I noticed that when the wheels arent on the car, the rotor has a side to side play (both sides do this). In fact, when you pull the hand brake, you can see rotor pushing outward (both sides do this as well). What I did was to loosen the hand brake cable even more (now it requires to be pull up a lot) and also wiggle that rotor side to side and somehow I broke that tension loose. After putting the wheels back, the clunk is gone and the wheel turns freely. The only thing is now I dont know if I should tighten the hand brake cable back a bit as it requires to be pulled way high but I m afraid its going to get stuck again.

I looked at the service manual page for parking brake shoe replacement. It's not as good as looking at the real thing, but it's a guide.

The spring on the end of the handbrake cable above the actuator lever is just to provide tension in the cable - it's not intended as a return spring for the brakes themselves. Those springs are inside the drum connected directly to the brake shoes.

As for lubrication, where the edges of the shoes and the actuator slide on the backing plate, they're greased with high temp grease, so there is lube in there.

Thing is, if you spray a liquid lube in through the hole, it'll get all over the brake friction surfaces, rendering the hand brake either weaker or non functional. It won't affect the service brakes, but I wouldn't take the risk, just the same. If you want to lube it, take the rotors off and do it right.

As to adjusting the hand brake cable, Ford's instructions say to pull the handbrake lever up to the first click and tighten the cable adjuster until the rear wheels demonstrate some noticeable drag, but not so much drag as they feel locked. Then drop the lever and make sure they turn freely. If you can adjust it to work like that and there's no mysterious noises, I'd say you're work is finished.

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[UnhandledException]

I looked at the service manual page for parking brake shoe replacement. It's not as good as looking at the real thing, but it's a guide.

The spring on the end of the handbrake cable above the actuator lever is just to provide tension in the cable - it's not intended as a return spring for the brakes themselves. Those springs are inside the drum connected directly to the brake shoes.

As for lubrication, where the edges of the shoes and the actuator slide on the backing plate, they're greased with high temp grease, so there is lube in there.

Thing is, if you spray a liquid lube in through the hole, it'll get all over the brake friction surfaces, rendering the hand brake either weaker or non functional. It won't affect the service brakes, but I wouldn't take the risk, just the same. If you want to lube it, take the rotors off and do it right.

As to adjusting the hand brake cable, Ford's instructions say to pull the handbrake lever up to the first click and tighten the cable adjuster until the rear wheels demonstrate some noticeable drag, but not so much drag as they feel locked. Then drop the lever and make sure they turn freely. If you can adjust it to work like that and there's no mysterious noises, I'd say you're work is finished.

The problem with doing what Ford says is one wheel (the one with clunk) starts showing resistance a lot sooner than the other wheel. If I adjust the cable such that I take the clunk side as baseline, the car slides down in a hill unless I pull the handbrake all the way up. If I baseline the non-clunk side, I'm pretty sure I will end up where I was 2 days ago with the passenger side locking up and making that clunk noise. I'm pretty sure at this point I need to adjust the shoe inside the caliper. I looked at the instructions (some posted the PDF online in TMO) and adjustment procedure looks simple if I can remove the rotor.

I might drive like this for a while and not bother. I think keeping the car on 1st gear (or reverse depending on facing uphill or not) is enough to keep it from rolling.

 

[UnhandledException]

Btw, I measured all of the old pads. The fronts are 6mm consistent on all 4 pads. Rears vary between 6-7mm. Maybe I could get more out of these, thinking next time I ll run them all the way till the pad indicators?

If new pads are 10mm, and it took me 62,000 miles to go through 4mm, I’m guessing I could get another 15,000 miles from these before an issue happened?

 

[JAJ]

The problem with doing what Ford says is one wheel (the one with clunk) starts showing resistance a lot sooner than the other wheel. If I adjust the cable such that I take the clunk side as baseline, the car slides down in a hill unless I pull the handbrake all the way up. If I baseline the non-clunk side, I'm pretty sure I will end up where I was 2 days ago with the passenger side locking up and making that clunk noise. I'm pretty sure at this point I need to adjust the shoe inside the caliper. I looked at the instructions (some posted the PDF online in TMO) and adjustment procedure looks simple if I can remove the rotor.

I might drive like this for a while and not bother. I think keeping the car on 1st gear (or reverse depending on facing uphill or not) is enough to keep it from rolling.

If something's different from side-to-side, then expect to take both sides apart to figure out which one's right. The right side is probably the problem, so start there. The parking brake is pretty simple in concept, so if it's messed up it should be easy to figure out.

As for pad life, it depends on your driving style and use. The OEM pads are 17mm in front, with a 6mm backing plate, so 11 mm of wear material. You've used 5 mm in 62,000 miles, so call it 12,000 miles per mm. You can run the pads from their current 6mm down to 3 mm (about where the wear indicator is) and that would put you at maybe another 30,000 to 35,000 miles. The rears start at 16 mm thick, so they look like they'll wear out pretty much at the same time as the fronts.

 

[UnhandledException]

If something's different from side-to-side, then expect to take both sides apart to figure out which one's right. The right side is probably the problem, so start there. The parking brake is pretty simple in concept, so if it's messed up it should be easy to figure out.

As for pad life, it depends on your driving style and use. The OEM pads are 17mm in front, with a 6mm backing plate, so 11 mm of wear material. You've used 5 mm in 62,000 miles, so call it 12,000 miles per mm. You can run the pads from their current 6mm down to 3 mm (about where the wear indicator is) and that would put you at maybe another 30,000 to 35,000 miles. The rears start at 16 mm thick, so they look like they'll wear out pretty much at the same time as the fronts.

Can you or someone else post the ford service manual instructions for rear rotor removal and shoe adjustment? I would appreciate this really, I want to study them and make sure I am prepared before doing this as this is my daily driver, I dont want to get stranded in my driveway

Also, one thing I can say right off the bat is looking at the parking brake adjustment mechanism under the car above the driveshaft tunnel (the one with the bolt), its clear that one cable is shorter/reaches to tension before other and that is the right side. When I loosened that nut a lot, I could see that bracket holding 3 cables basically started being sideways to the point the left side’s cable could be popped out while right side couldnt. I dont know if this indicates a problem with the cables OR the cables are behaving the way they are due to the shoe behavior inside the park brake.

100,000 miles for brake pads is insane. Maybe I should have saved $400 and waited 2 more years:(

 

[UnhandledException]

Edit: I found the procedure at TMO (https://trackmustangsonline.com/threads/gt350-rear-caliper-removal.10913/#post-181866). It looks like:

- I need to remove the brake fluid hard line and discard some washers (and get new ones).
- This also means flushing the brake lines again for that side.
- I also need to remove/discard brake caliper bolts (and get new ones)

I am surprised that they want you to remove the brake lines. Why cant you just slide it out and hang it to the suspension with a zip tie? Maybe good reason for it, I just dont see it.

 

[Epiphany]

I am surprised that they want you to remove the brake lines. Why cant you just slide it out and hang it to the suspension with a zip tie? Maybe good reason for it, I just dont see it.

They don't suggest "removing" brake lines. They show disconnecting the line via the banjo bolt because the procedure they are illustrating is for rear brake caliper removal and not simply pad replacement.

 

[UnhandledException]

They don't suggest "removing" brake lines. They show disconnecting the line via the banjo bolt because the procedure they are illustrating is for rear brake caliper removal and not simply pad replacement.

Thank you for clarifying

 

[matthewr87]

If something's different from side-to-side, then expect to take both sides apart to figure out which one's right. The right side is probably the problem, so start there. The parking brake is pretty simple in concept, so if it's messed up it should be easy to figure out.

As for pad life, it depends on your driving style and use. The OEM pads are 17mm in front, with a 6mm backing plate, so 11 mm of wear material. You've used 5 mm in 62,000 miles, so call it 12,000 miles per mm. You can run the pads from their current 6mm down to 3 mm (about where the wear indicator is) and that would put you at maybe another 30,000 to 35,000 miles. The rears start at 16 mm thick, so they look like they'll wear out pretty much at the same time as the fronts.

I just measured my new OEM fronts out of the box and they are about 15 mm total with around 9 mm of wear material. Do they come in different sizes or something? Or did I just get sent used pads....

 

[JAJ]

Edit: I found the procedure at TMO (https://trackmustangsonline.com/threads/gt350-rear-caliper-removal.10913/#post-181866). It looks like:

- I need to remove the brake fluid hard line and discard some washers (and get new ones).
- This also means flushing the brake lines again for that side.
- I also need to remove/discard brake caliper bolts (and get new ones)

I am surprised that they want you to remove the brake lines. Why cant you just slide it out and hang it to the suspension with a zip tie? Maybe good reason for it, I just dont see it.

As @Epiphany said, those instructions are for changing calipers. If you're just taking the rotor off, just unbolt the caliper, leave it connected, and hang it back out of the way on a piece of wire wrapped around the sway bar. The flex line is long enough for that.

Also, don't bother removing the brake pads from the calipers when you take them off. You can just push them back a bit to create some space so you can slip the caliper off and back on.

 

[UnhandledException]

The park brake is fine for now. It looks like it may have been overtightened and that caused the park brake to get stuck during removing the lug nuts using breaker bar. Thats my only explanation of it. Ever since I loosened the park brake cable and then tightened back to spec, I havent had issues. That being said, following Ford's instructions (pull the park brake to 1st click and turn the wheels and tighten until there is resistance but doesnt fully stop) I did observe that one wheel (the problem side) does have more resistance than the other side. For instance, that side will turn 1 and 1/4 turns whereas the other side turns 1 and 3/4 turns. If I tighten the park brake cable to take loose side as baseline, I think I might end up overtightening it which is what I didnt do.

Attaching a picture of the brake fluid I got out. You can see I took out 1.5 liters (took 3 full bottles of new fluid and a tiny amount more from 4th bottle). JAJ's instructions on how many pedal strokes each side takes was extremely useful especially for first time doing this. I probably didnt need to do it to this extent (the rear ones were probably 6-7 strokes extra and fronts were 1-2 extra). You can see the amount of black dirt that came out, remember this was stock fluid as filled in the factory precisely 4 years ago (my car was 2nd week of september production in 2016).

I have now put over 250 miles on the new pads. There is some squealing in slow speeds, but its fine. Copper paste did come with the new pads (and had original Brembo logo and Made In Italy) but I chose not to use it because the stock pads didnt have any paste on them and also I think they would make a big mess.

The stopping speed and pedal feel did improve and I simply cannot believe the stopping power this car has with its weight (and price point). It is not quite as aggressive as the GT3RS or ZR1 (and ZR1 is noticeably better than GT3RS), but it is still pretty amazing.

Thanks everyone for all the help, especially JAJ.

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