Originally Posted By: Quest
Originally Posted By: Reddy45
My original post was baseless, and I appreciate the explanation. I actually did a brake job recently and did use bearing grease on the caliper pins. It has been a week so far and nothing has seized on me, but I'll be re-doing the caliper pins this weekend.
I actually went to ACDelco and picked up the CRC StaLube Synthetic Grease for under $6 for a tube that will probably last me 20 years.
Don't worry, if it doesn't happen to you (with bearing grease) in days/weeks, it will definitely happen to you in months and before you knew it, one faithful day (or an emergency/panic braking event) you'll realise what happened to your caliper.
Good luck.
Q.
p.s. please carefully clean out all the bearing grease in your caliper assembly and then either replace all the rubber components and lube it with CRC caliper lube, or if the original rubber components still holds, lube it with fresh new CRC cal lube.
If you chose to reuse the original (now somewhat contaminated with bearing grease) rubber components, do form a habit of checking on them every 6 months or so to see if they disintegrate (by squeezing/slightly stretching them while they are still on the car), replace them ASAP.
I actually did the job tonight after work. I'm glad I did too because one of the driver's side caliper pins was almost "glued" to the rubber flange because of the bearing grease.
I basically cleaned out the caliper pin holes really well with solvent and q-tips, and then dried them out. I used clean towels to clean the rubber flanges since I did not want to risk using solvent on them.
Then, I used the synthetic CRC grease and filled the inside of the flanges, and then put some on the pins and worked them into the holes until they started to form that "vacuum" effect.
Finished the job, went inside for a few and then took it out for a test drive. OBVIOUS difference. Before, it felt like the brake pedal had an early "engagement point" before it went full-on brake, but now it's basically very smooth from little pressure to hard pressure. Very controllable. Oddly, I found out that my brake lights still work when the truck is not even turned on.
Thanks Quest. I'd be screwed if you hadn't posted up the warning about bearing grease.