How To Replace Rear Brakes 2001-10 GMC Sierra 2500HD

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly: that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video we are going to be showing you how to replace the rear brakes on this 2002 GMC 2500 HD, same as a Chevy as well, same as 2000 to 2007 both GMC and Chevy 2500 HDs. Tools you will need are 18 and 22mm sockets with your ratchet, and a breaker bar and pipe for more leverage. I also do show you a way to get leverage with an 18mm wrench and an additional wrench to hook to it, large regular screwdriver or small pry bar, a large hammer, small and small stubby regular screwdrivers, also a brake spoon for that part of the video would work, wire brush, bearing grease, small hammer and of course jack and jack stands.

Start out by removing your wheel. Carefully remove the plastic retainers and your center cap and then if you are working with hand tools you want to start with the vehicle on the ground, loosen the lug nuts, then raise it up and secure it, and then remove the lug nuts. I have the benefit of air tools here, so I removed the lug nuts and removed the tire.

So taking a closer look at our brakes, you can see our discs are really deteriorating here, so we are going to replace those, and you can see right in there, that pad, we had a little bit of life left and the other one looks like it's got more, but obviously we are going to replace the pads as well.

So to remove the calipers, here, what we are going to do is we are going to undo this 18mm bolt here and then the same one down here, an 18mm bolt. These are Torx screws, but this top one is very difficult to get to, so what we are going to do is we are going to take the bolts off and remove the whole caliper bracket and everything first. Before you unbolt it, what you can do is take a large screwdriver. I have a breaker bar here. Feed it right into this hole here and pry out and that forces the pistons back into the caliper. There is somewhat limited room here, so I put my 18mm wrench on there, take another wrench which gives me a little extra leverage, and if you have a breaker bar and a socket available then you can usually fit those in there as well. I am just showing you this as an alternative method. I can remove this bolt and it comes right off. The lower one is easier to get to so you can use the ratchet or breaker bar, or anything, or air tools. I will finish getting this out and you can bring the caliper up like that. I am going to fast forward here. Basically once you pull that bracket up, you just have to force the shoes down through the bracket and the biggest thing is there are little wear tabs that will get caught and you just make sure you bend those wear tabs in and the shoes will go down right through the bracket and you can pull the bracket right off.

Now, what we have here is we got our caliper. I got a big C-clamp and one of the old pads, so I am going to work this caliper with the C-clamp and push those pistons back in and I am going to wipe down these slide bolts. They look like they are in nice shape. Clean up the sticky stuff on them. Put on a little bit of new bearing grease. Make sure they're moving well.

Now I move this caliper, it's got a couple little locks to hold it on. You can either break these off or twist them off. They come off easily enough. Now I am just going to coat this with some penetrating oil. I already know my rotor is in tough shape, so I am not going to worry too much about hurting it, when I get them off. It actually came off really easily. You can hit it right back here where your caliper was and I have open space.

You saw my rotor come off really easy, but that is not always going to be the case. Sometimes your emergency brake might be adjusted so that the rotor doesn't come off very easily, so the first thing you might want to do is to have a short screwdriver, so I am talking with the rotor still on, you reach back here and you can see I am pulling that plug out. What you are going to want do is take another screwdriver or a little bit larger, but still a small screwdriver and go through the back side until you feel this wheel and then you are going to turn the wheel star down, which is bringing the screwdriver up, and that will basically loosen your emergency brake so your rotor will come off easier. So I have used some mineral spirits, and I've cleaned off my shoes for my emergency brake and I see that I got some oil on there and that probably means I've got bad axle seal, but this truck got 240,000 miles on it, so I am not that worried about it. I am going to use some anti-seize here. I'm probably never going to have to get this off again, but if I do have to get it off again now I know I can.

The new rotor from 1A Auto is in a lot better shape than the old one. It goes right on. I lightly secure with a couple of lug nuts and now I am going to take my small screwdriver, go in to the backside and tighten up the emergency brake adjuster, basically until I start feeling it give some friction to the wheel. I am going to fast forward through this. You do want to go on this side with the handle of your screwdriver up and then move it down, which moves the wheel up inside the rotor and it is kind of trial and error. Sometimes you can move it one way and you don't tighten it and then move it the other way and you do tighten it. It takes a little longer, but adjust them until you have good friction from the shoes and then make sure you replace that rubber dust plug.

Here is my bracket for my brake shoes and what I am going to do is just take these stainless steel slides with a wire brush on them and clean them all up. Get all this dirt off of them. Here are new pads from 1A Auto. You can see a little bit more life then the old pads that were on there. So we got our caliper with slide bolts cleaned and well-greased. This can be the problem with these trucks if these dry out and get dirt in them or whatever, the calipers actually seize up and your rear brakes do not even work, so if that the case you may want to replace these slide bolts, but you definitely want to get them out, clean them up and if you have to wire brush them and make sure you get a good amount of grease back on them. I've got my shoes right there. What I am going to do is take my bracket and just put a little tiny bit of that penetrating oil and that is not really going to make it slide, it is just to make it easier to get together. Put my brackets down on to the slide bolts, then into the shoes. Use a small hammer and looking at these carefully, make sure that the wear tabs go through correctly and also that your shoes are in the right spot here. It's just out there. Okay, that shoe is on. It may benefit you to take like a screwdriver or pry bar and just kind of, the shoe is getting stuck here on this slide a little bit. Push it into place and then lower it, and it looks like it could go in a little bit, push them into place a little bit and then it goes down on. You might have to shake it around a little bit before it goes in towards that bolt. Do the same down here. Get the lower bolt started and take out my lower bolt a little bit with the air wrench. I cannot really get a torque wrench down here, so I am going to just put my wrench back on here and tighten this up really good and it should be tightened to about 120 foot-pounds. We will use a torque wrench.

I am going to speed it up here as I remove those two lug nuts, then put the wheel on, hand thread my lug nuts at first, then use my air wrench just to tighten them up a little bit. Very important: you want to make sure before you test drive the vehicle you pump the brakes a bunch of times then make sure it stops from like five miles an hour and ten miles an hour before you road test.

Here again, fast forward as I have now put the vehicle on the ground and I am torquing the lug nuts to 120 foot-pounds using a crossing pattern and then I actually go around one-by-one afterwards just to check and make sure that they are all torqued, and then put your cap on and hand tighten the plastic retainers.

We hope this video 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.

How To Replace Rear Brakes 2001-10 GMC Sierra 2500HD

step 1 :Removing the Wheel

step 2 :Inspecting the Brakes

step 3 :Removing the Brake Pads

step 4 :Removing the Rotor

step 5 :Installing the Rotor

step 6 :Installing the New Brake Pads

step 7 :Reattaching the Wheel

step 8 :Testing the Brakes

Tools needed

Shop Products

Chevrolet GMC Rear Semi-Metallic Performance Brake Pad & Rotor Kit with Calipers TRQ Performance BKA58335

How to Replace Front Brakes 2008-14 Cadillac CTS

Same Day Shipping

Guaranteed To Fit

USA Customer Support

Instructional Video Library

How To Replace Rear Brakes 2001-10 GMC Sierra 2500HD

step 1 :Removing the Wheel 1:51

step 2 :Inspecting the Brakes 1:41

step 3 :Removing the Brake Pads 2:04

step 4 :Removing the Rotor 5:06

step 5 :Installing the Rotor 7:15

step 6 :Installing the New Brake Pads 8:30

step 7 :Reattaching the Wheel 13:01

step 8 :Testing the Brakes 13:10

Tools needed

Shop Products

Chevrolet GMC Rear Semi-Metallic Performance Brake Pad & Rotor Kit with Calipers TRQ Performance BKA58335

How to Replace Front Brakes 2008-14 Cadillac CTS

Same Day Shipping

Guaranteed To Fit

USA Customer Support

Instructional Video Library

step 1 :Removing the Wheel

step 2 :Inspecting the Brakes

step 3 :Removing the Brake Pads

step 4 :Removing the Rotor

step 5 :Installing the Rotor

step 6 :Installing the New Brake Pads

step 7 :Reattaching the Wheel

step 8 :Testing the Brakes