well im restoring my 1985 crx si, and the front brakes drag like hell. i took off the caliper and tried pushing the brake piston in and its like crazy hard. so i pushed it back and forth a couple times and put it back together. still drags like hell.

my dad is telling me that i have to buy a rebuilt caliper, but in the manual it says you can just take the piston out and smear some brake fluid in there and reassemble it.

what should i do here? anyone had this problem before?

 

You can buy them rebuilt from an auto parts store for fairly cheap, or you can build them yourself. There's 1 seal and a dust seal plu 2 dust seals for the slider pins per side. Not much to replace. Tear them apart (compressed air works to get the piston out) but be careful. Use safety glasses, brake fluid burns like hell. Before you use air to remove the piston lay an old pad in the caliper to stop the piston. Clean everything really well and you can use some scotch brite to get rid of any rust, Honda will give you grease to use when you reassemble everything. First time doing it will take a while but there's always job satisfaction when it's down, but it's much easier to buy them rebuilt.

 

thanks a lot man!

where can i get those seals and stuff? or do i even need to replace those?

 

just get the honda parts, they are cheap

 

Yeah, I also recommend doing it yourself. I've rebuilt a rear caliper (harder than the front, IMO) and a power steering pump (VERY easy). I've spent a quarter of what the reman parts cost.

Get the seals and **** at Honda. I was surprised to find that they were acutally cheaper at the dealership than at the local autoparts store (NAPA and Advance)

 

you can rebuld your calipers from buying your parts online from hparts or hondaautomotiveparts . you do have to consider tho a complete "rebuild" should include checking your caliper piston and usually requires replacing if they have never been replaced before and the brakes have not been maintained well. because often, pistons will have pits and rust and cant be buffed out.

so the cost of pistons and seals, and maybe boots (i found my boots totally reusable after cleaningthem up, but decided to use the new ones i bought) pretty much costs the same for a set of autostore rebuilds. the disadvantage of buying em is that you dont know if they replaced the pistons either.

rebuilding calipers can be hard if you dont know what youre doing, theres a couple things that can cause problems. first is properly pushing the piston out, only done properly and effectively by using compressed air. then its reinstalling everything. when you get the seal and the boot in place, i found that the piston could not be inserted while maintaining the placement of the boot. so what i did was create a cylinder sleeve using a cut up spray can top. this helped tremendously. also, consider the amount of time you will try to clean off the calipers, which you can almost spend a whole day doing.

 

Yeah, it's not that hard to do and much cheaper to rebuild them yourself. The rebuild kits are only 4-5$ each, try it out you might learn something.