How to Replace Front Brakes 2010-17 GMC Terrain

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To do the brake job the first thing you need to do is take off the wheel. And before you jack up the vehicle, you want to crack all of these lug nuts loose because that way the wheel won't spin when you're trying to turn the lug nuts. You can use a 22 millimeter socket to do this or if you want to use the lug nut wrench that comes with the car in the spare tire kit you can use that as well.

You can use a jack and jack stands to lift the vehicle in a driveway situation or a garage, but we have a lift to make the video shooting a little bit easier. So we're going to go ahead and raise it up on the lift. Now that the vehicle is off the ground, we can remove the rest of the lug nuts. It's easy to use a 22 millimeter deep socket to reach in there and spin them out. Now we can pull wheel off of the vehicle just like this.

We're going to take the caliper off of the caliper bracket next. You can do that with a 14 millimeter wrench. On the bolt right here this is the lower caliper bolt, we'll just crack it loose and then we can spin it out by hand. And now we'll do the upper bolt which is right up here at the top of the bracket. Again we'll just crack it loose and then spin it right out by hand.

When you take off the caliper, like right now it feels pretty tight so what I like to do is kind of put my weight on it and pull and that collapses the piston a little bit, it pushes down on this piston so that's it's easy to take off. Once you have the caliper removed, you want to hang it with a bungee cord or something similar, maybe some wire. And you want to hang it so that there's no weight ever hanging on the brake line or the brake hose. Just like that.

We're going to take the caliper bracket off next and for that we need an 18 millimeter wrench or an 18 millimeter socket. And we'll just go ahead and pull down on this to get it loose. We'll loosen the bottom one as well. With the bolts loose you can pull them both out and then you should be able to pull the caliper bracket and the brake pads off all at once.

The rotor itself needs to come off next, and holding the rotor on is this T30 Torx bit or Torx bolt. It looks like a star. So we're going to go ahead and pull that out next. Amazingly this one is turning, it's really common for these things to be rusted in place. If they are rusted in place, what you can do is you can put a wrench on it like this and then use the ratchet like this and that will hold the rotor in place as you turn it so it allows you to get a little more force on it. The rotor is actually stuck on the hub. Normally you can pull the rotor right off at this point and I would bet that if you're not in New England you could probably do that, but in New England everything is rusty and therefore we have to hammer this rotor off because it's rusted all around the hub and probably even around all of the lug nuts or all of the lugs. So what we're going to do is spray some rust penetrant in each one of these holes and try and loosen up the rust. Now that we've got the rust penetrant in there and sitting for a few minutes now we're going to hit it with a hammer. Ideally you want to hit in between these lugs but in this case the rotor is just going to be thrown in the trash anyways because we're putting a new rotor on, so I'm going to go ahead and hit it right on the rotor surface. That will give us fulcrum and lever effect, so hopefully we'll get this rotor off in no time. You can see it's loosening up. There we go. This is a really common thing to do in New England or anywhere there's rust. But if don't have rust or you live in a desert or something, the rotor comes off way easier than this.

Now you can pull the brake pads right out of the caliper bracket. Sometimes they'll be stuck in there or sometimes they'll just fall out. That'll do it. You can see we have the old rotor here and the new rotor here. It looks identical except for brand new of course. It has the chamfered slot for the torque bolt so it holds it onto the hub. Obviously the same bolt pattern, the right thickness, and then we have the brake pads. You can see the old ones are very worn out they're definitely at the end of their life. But the new ones have the same squeaker just like the factory one. And they'll fit and look and work just like the originals.

One of the nice things to do when you're doing a rotor in a rusty environment is you want to put some anti-seize around this hub, and that way when the next person takes the rotor off it won't be as stuck on as it was for us. Sort of a nice thing to do for the next person. So we'll put a little anti-seize on there right around where it rusts and then we'll slide the rotor on. Make sure you line up this hole with this hole in the hub. And then we can put the bolt in. Much like we put the anti-seize on the hub, we'll put a little bit on this bolt too because these also like to get stuck in the hub. It's usually only a precaution if you live in the rusty environment that we live in.

Once it's hand tightened then we'll tighten it up with a ratchet. You can see that there's some greasy palm prints all around this along with a little bit of anti-seize. We're going to go ahead and spray that off with some brake clean and that way when the new pads and the new rotors go together for the first time, it'll be a nice clean environment for them and there won't be any grease or other material messing up the brakes. Be sure to do the back side as well.

We're now going to clean the caliper bracket so that the caliper slides are nice and smooth for the brake pads. Otherwise the brake pads could get stuck and then they'll wear unevenly. You can usually do this with brake clean and a rag or a wire brush. We happen to have a parts washing tank, so we're going use that but either way it works great. Brake cleaner is a phenomenal fluid that will clean this great along with a wire brush.

The next thing you want to check is to make sure that these caliper slides are moving freely. Occasionally they'll get water intrusion and then they'll rust up and they'll get stuck and that much like having the caliper slides that are clean, will also wear your brake pads unevenly. If yours are not moving freely, you can just pull them right out, the rubber boot slides off the top just like that. Inside you can see it's greasy.

What you would want to do is clean out the bore with some brake clean and then lightly grease this. Make sure you don't put too much grease because if you put too much grease then the bolt will actually create a hydraulic situation in here where it won't push all the way down, but you just want to lightly coat it with grease and put it right back in until it moves freely.

Right here, these are your brake pad slider brackets and they are removable and replaceable. Sometimes it'll come with a brake pad kit other times it won't. These ones are made out of stainless steel so they'll probably outlast the vehicle. If yours are stainless steel they're probably in good shape so you just need to wash them.

Now we're going to install the caliper bracket back onto the knuckle. We'll slide these two 18 millimeter bolts into the knuckle and thread them in by hand. Now you can tighten them up with your wrench of choice either a 18 millimeter wrench or an 18 millimeter socket. In this case the 18 millimeter wrench happens to be in my hand so that's what I'm going to go with. Now we're going to torque the two bolts to 140 foot-pounds with a torque wrench. The inner brake pad has a metal clip that goes on it just like this. This came off the old brake pads. And this just basically goes up against the piston up here so that it's a nice flat surface. If yours were destroyed it probably wouldn't matter a whole lot, but since we have a nice set here we're going to reuse them.

Before we put the brake pads in we're going to put a little anti-seize on the edges of the brake pad and that will allow them to slide nice and smooth. Even if they get hot it won't burn off because it's rated for a very high temperature. You just want to get into the slot and then on the flat spots where it rides. At this point slide them right into the bracket. There's one and then we'll do the inside one next. And there we are.

Before we put the caliper on, we have to compress the piston back into the caliper so we're going to use a large C-clamp for that and all you do for that is spin it in like this. And then you can slowly turn the C-clamp and it will compress the caliper piston back into the housing. You have to go a little bit slowly because it's moving all of the brake fluid back up into the master cylinder, which it doesn't necessarily love to do. You have to do it in a slow fashion. Now it's fully compressed so I can remove the C-clamp.

Now we'll take the caliper off of the bungee cord that we have. Pull it out so we don't forget it and we can put the caliper back onto the caliper bracket and over the brake pads. Now we can take the two 14 millimeter bolts that go on the caliper and hand-tighten those. Now we can tighten up these two 14 millimeters with a torque wrench to 20 foot-pounds.

Now we can put the wheel back on. Just line up the lug nuts, slide it on and then you can hand tighten the lug nuts. With all of the lug nuts hand tight then you can put your ratchet on it and we're just going to snug them up as best we can with the vehicle in the air and then we'll get it on the ground and tighten it up.

Now we'll lower the vehicle right back down to the ground. Now we're going to torque the lug nuts to 125 foot-pounds. And we'll do it in a cross pattern.

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