How To Replace Rear Brakes 2000-05 Buick LeSabre

Brought to you by 1A Auto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet. Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out. Next time you need parts for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks. In this video, we're going to show you how to replace the rear brakes on this 2000 Buick LeSabre. The brakes on this car end up being in pretty good shape, so we just show you how to remove them and reinstall them. New brakes are available at 1AAuto.com.

Tools you'll need for this job are jack and jack stands, 12, 13, 15 and 19 millimeter sockets, ratchets and extensions. You'll need a breaker bar or a pipe, for some leverage, large flat blade screwdriver, a hammer, a torque wrench, and a large c-clamp. Pull firmly on this hubcap. If you don't have the benefit of air tools, you'll want to have your vehicle on the ground. Loosen the lug nuts first, then raise and secure the vehicle and remove the lug nuts the rest of the way.

Just fast forward here as I remove the lug nuts and remove the rear wheel. You can see my brakes are actually in pretty good shape. Right here's the metal of the pad, and then the pad itself. There's a little hole right there, that's actually the wear indicator. Once that gap, or hole, is gone, that's when you know you need to replace the pads. You can see that they still have some life left. What you're going to want to do is remove this bolt here. This is a 12 millimeter bolt. I'll fast forward here. You can see it took a little bit of force, but that bolt should come out pretty easy. Use a 13 millimeter socket and remove this bracket right here as well. Now take a good sized screwdriver, you can put it right in here and pry out a little bit. That will help reset the piston and help loosen up the caliper. Now you pull this up. You actually slide your... you want to make sure your caliper slides okay. If you're just looking to replace the pads, you can, now, just pull the pads right out from the front and in the back. As I said, these pads are in good shape. Still got most of the wear mark.

You can check the condition of your rotors just by kind of running the back of your fingernail up and down them. These are actually in pretty good shape. There's no real big grooves in them. If you did want to replace or turn your rotors, you'll want to remove this bolt and then this bolt down here further. For this, I'm going to use a larger wrench. I'm actually even going to take a piece of pipe, put it on my ratchet. This gives me a little extra leverage. Back. I'm just going to pull nice and easy till this bolt starts turning. For this bottom one, I've got a 15 millimeter wrench. It's a little bit of tight quarters. I'm actually going to take a 18 millimeter wrench and hook it on here. That's going to give me some extra leverage here. Again, just pull nice and easy till the bolt starts to come loose. I'm speeded up here again. As you can see, after just a couple turns, I'm going to be able to reach up in there and take that bolt out most of the way with just my fingers. Once you get this upper bolt off, then this whole bracket assembly just lifts right up and off. I'm going to put it up here for now. The rotor's kind of frozen. The best thing is a large hammer. Hit the center of the rotor here. Comes off.

You can see in this shot, there's a nice new hub on there. That's what this car actually needed, was a new rear hub. If you want to see more details on doing that, you can check our other videos. As I said before, the brakes on this car are in good shape, so you're just going to see me put those back together. We'll pick it up from there. Reinstall our disc. I like to just put a lug nut on here, just kind of holds everything in place. Bring our bracket down and force it inside here, down into place and start our large 15 millimeter bolt. I'm going to speed things up here as I start the first bolt, and then the other bolts, and then just kind of preliminarily tighten them with my ratchet and wrench. The bottom, I can't get a torque wrench on here, so what I'm going to do is I'll get it tight with my wrench first. Once I get it tight with the single wrench, then I hook my other wrench on and pull it tight using extra leverage. Now on the top, I use a torque wrench and torque the top bolt to 60 foot pounds.

Before you put your new pads on, you want to reset the piston in your caliper. I've got a large c-clamp pushing on the piston and then on the back caliper here. Then simply pull your caliper up, put the back one in. Put the front one on here. Put your caliper down in place. As you're pushing the caliper down, you might need to push this back like that. You want to torque this anywhere from 12 to 15 foot pounds. I'll speed it up here as I remove that lug nut, put that wheel back on, start all the lug nuts by hand first, and then you want to just, preliminarily, tighten the lug nuts before you put the car on the ground. Now use a torque wrench and torque your lug nuts to 100 foot pounds. Use a star pattern as the order in which you torque them. Any time you take the brakes apart, make sure that you pump your pedal a whole bunch of times until it gets firm. Then do test stops from 5 and 10 miles an hour. Make sure the brakes are working correctly before you road-test your vehicle.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts, and the best service on the internet. Please feel free to call us toll free, (888) 844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the internet and in person.