One of my rear brake calipers locked up and gouged out my rotor. Metal on metal is not a good thing when it comes to brakes.
A little hard to tell from this pic, but I needed a new rotor to replace this one which is badly gouged. Rotor = disc.
This tool is made for turning rear brake pistons. The piston should turn fairly easily. Using full strength, this one would barely move.
The best price I found for a Tokico replacement caliper was $75 from Advanced Auto. This price did not include the core charge.
Also, this caliper was not "loaded" meaning it came without brake pads. Mounting hardware was included. They also gave me a great price on a Bendix rotor for $64.
There was a wide range of prices for the caliper from different suppliers. The highest quote I got was $249 for a loaded caliper, so shop around and save some bucks.
Generally when replacing a caliper it is recommended to replace the brake line too, in case a kink or degradation inside the brake line was a contributing factor to the caliper failing. I chose to replace all my original brake lines on my twenty year old car with stainless steel (SS) brake lines.
I bought Earl's Hyperfirm Stainless Steel brake lines. This was a great product. The shop where I bought them went out of business. These lines went on like butter, perfect fit.
Kit came with six lines, two for each rear wheel, one for each front wheel. You need flare-nut wrenches to do brake-line work. Here are some random shots.
rear driver
rear driver
The Earl's name.
pass rear
front pass
I like the way the new SS lines attached to the car body with 22 mm nuts. The old rubber brake lines were just attached with clips.
Bleed the crap out of all the lines after the install.
Just like the rear passenger caliper above, the front driver caliper eventually locked up and I decided to replace both front calipers at the same time.
The front calipers are easy pretty straight foward to replace. Undo the brake lines and two bolts for each caliper. On earlier Z's the outside wheel bearings have to be removed in order to get the rotors off the car to turn them. Not on mine. Since I bought the calipers "fully loaded" it was a simple bolt-on procedure. I don't have any pics because it was in the middle of winter and I paid a kid in his heated garage to do the work.
Autopartswarehouse.com treated me right for a pair of these. When comparing prices, these calipers came fully loaded - all the hardware and pads included - which made them a better deal overall.
Obligatory box shot. Core charge was $18.30 per caliper, so save the boxes for return.
Centric part number for driver side (left) front. Reminder, car is a 1987 Turbo. Passenger side (right) part number is 142.42057.
I had to go on-line at Autopartswarehouse.com with live chat to get an RA (return authorization) number for returning the old cores. They told me to wait 24-48 hours but the RA number was in my E-mail box in less than one hour. The return instructions were very strict, e.g. "no tape on the retail boxes."
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