Brake Pad Replacement Cost
Brake repairs can be costly, but one way to reduce your brake pad replacement cost is to do the work yourself. It can give you a great sense of accomplishment and fulfillment when you take care of car maintenance tasks like this on your own rather than relying on an expensive garage or mechanic.
Best of all is it helps you save money. While you will need a certain amount of skill and knowledge, with practice brake pad replacements become much easier. Plus learning to do your own break repairs could lead to other easy car repairs meaning over time you save much more money and gain additional knowledge about your car and confidence in your own mechanical abilities.
DIY Brake Pad Replacement
Your first job when considering replacing your own brake pads is to know what kind of pads you need for your make and model car. Once you have the make and model most auto supply stores can lead you in the right direction to choose the proper pads. If you want to be sure you have the right information before you go shopping refer to your cars owners manual or look the information up online. If you do not already have all the tools you need to do a brake pad replacement then pick those up while you are getting the pads. If you haven’t already looked it up, the tools you will need for this job are a car jack, gloves and goggles, c-clamp, lug wrench and various other sizes of wrenches.
When you are ready to start the repair make sure you have your car parked in a suitable place. If you have a garage that is ideal since the floor will be level and stable. If you are doing the replacement in a driveway or elsewhere make sure the surface is level so the car is not able to move on its own. Also make sure the surface is stable. Do not try to jack your car up on gravel or stones as they could shift, potentially causing damage to your car and injury to yourself. Always set the emergency break before jacking up a car and as an extra precaution you can block the back wheels.
Before you begin
You should have consulted your owners manual or a reliable online source to determine where your breaks are located before you began this repair. If they are front breaks you will be lifting the front end of your car and if they are rear brakes you will lift the rear end. Some cars have disc breaks on all four wheels in which case you will be lifting both the front and the back. The order in which you do this doesn’t matter. Place the jack in a secure position and then put the jack stand in its place. Once you raise the appropriate end with your jack you can remove the tire by using the lug wrench to remove the lugs and gain access to the break system. You will have to do this for each tire that you plan on replacing the break pads.
Once you have access to the break system carefully pull the caliper back and hold it in place using the c-clamp. You can then remove the pad. When you remove the pad take a look at the rotor to see if it has been damaged in any way, especially if your pads were almost totally worn out. If you see any marks or grooves in the rotor you may need to repair the rotor. This is much more complex than changing brake pads and should be handled by a professional mechanic.
Attaching the new brake pads
As long as there is no problems with the rotor you can attach the new break pads to the caliper. While this is a simple step you want to make sure that everything is securely in place before you replace the caliper and the tire. Otherwise you could have problems down the road (literally). One everything is secure you can then remove the c-clamp and replace the tire and then move on to the next break pad to be replaced.
While this is a simple repair if you feel like you don’t have the knowledge or skills to complete it on your own by all means take the car to a professional. Not everyone has the mechanical skills and aptitude to take care of their own car repairs, even simple ones like a break pad replacement. It makes sense to do this easy replacement on your own, but not if you think you will make some error because in the future this could make your brake pad replacement cost skyrocket when your rotors also need to be replaced.
