Just a friendly reminder to check/clean/grease your caliper pins. Since i have purchased my vehicle shortly after my brakes started to squeal. I took it into multiple Subaru dealerships and all they had to say was that they cleaned it and that the pads have good life. Finally i got some time to do some work on it myself and had ordered front and rear pads because i assumed the brakes pads were getting worn and im about to start towing a trailer much more frequently and wanted to be safe as possible.
After i took everything apart and cleaned the crap out of every single brake related part, i finally found what was cause the squealing.
A single LHF side caliper pin was seized up. After freeing it and cleaning it i greased it up with some 3M (08946) and set everything back in at proper specs. Now shes riding and breaking like a dream. I even had plenty of life left on the pads (I believe i measured 7mm on outfacing and 8mm on infacing on both front sides, where 1.5mm is the end of life). So since im probably not the only one thats dealt with this i figured id hash it out to everyone! Cheers!
Also if you remove the pins to grease, be sure to put the correct pin back into the proper position. The 2 pins per caliper are not the same.
And follow what Marty said. The little bit of grease between the clip and bracket helps to slow rusting which will tighten the pads. I wire wheel the bracket first and then apply the grease but they still rust bad in salt use areas.
Whoops, usually i do put things back exactly as how i found it, its good practice, but honestly can’t remember if i did. What would happen in such a case?
This is an excellent post, especially applicable to those of us in the areas that use salt/brine. I just had a caliper freeze up on my truck, while replacing the caliper noticed the pads were not moving and the hardware all rusted. This weekend I am going to take the other 3 apart, replace the clips, clean everything up and add some grease where applicable. Should have done this several times over the years and will do so on my Suby.
I re-lube the slider pins and clip and brackets every 2 years, This year was the first on this car and the pins on the front brakes were already sticking a bit. So good to feel the smooth slide after reassembly. Highly recommended imho.
would this cause pulsating brakes? Our crosstrek starting having pulsating under heavy breaking on the driver front brakes with only 15k on the dial. Seems light on mileage to me.
Not really. Sounds more like a bad rotor. Hard to say the reason but the front brakes on the Crosstrek usually last for quite a long time. I changed mine at over 90,000 miles and still had a lot of pad left. In any event, you should be under warranty so talk to the dealer about it. Brakes are a wear item but no way they should be bad at 15k.