Originally Posted By: Miller88
Sunday, a friend brought his Accord by because it was making a noise. Turns out the pads were completely gone and starting to eat into the rotor. It has the integrated parking brake, so the piston is threaded. The piston won't go back in so he has to have it go to a shop. That's going to be mucho dinero.
Has to? If you can't slip the caliper over the rotor ridge, just grind the ridge down on the rotor. If it just needs the caliper piston be rotated, just get this for $38:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002RDGMNM/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_ttl?_encoding=UTF8
I couldn't get my Dakota front caliper off last week because one of the caliper pins stripped out the hex key socket. I removed the other pin, ground a pad ear off with an angle grinder, rotated around the stuck pin, removed the pads and removed the caliper.
There's always a way. If you're replacing rotors or calipers anyway, you don't even need to be careful.
Since we're talking about Accords, Million Mile Joe religiously replaced his rears every 300,000 miles. I've always thought mine should last that long, but usually something intervenes to junk them early, like the shoe friction material cracking or a wheel cylinder leaking. By "early" I mean 15 years/150K miles or so.
Originally Posted By: supton
I think you generalize too much. My vintage Jetta is well known for wearing rear brake pads at a rate of 2x the front pads. They are also known for needing new calipers at brake time (something about the rear calipers, they just plain get sticky).
You're right. While most vehicles are gentle on rear shoes/pads, Honda Pilots wear them out at 80-90K miles, while the fronts last 90K-100K miles. Terrible engineering, huh?