99 Park Ave. rear brakes

[Mudbone]

I finally had to install new rear pads and rotors on my wife’s 99 Park Ave. I have done a lot of brakes but this was the first time for the rear of the Ave. Before I started I pulled out the factory service manual set I purchased off of E-bay years ago. The manual shows using a C-Clamp to push back the piston. After pulling the wheel and looking at the brakes I remembered the park brake is part of the caliper and piston. From prior experience I know that you have to screw the piston back in to retract it. So if you can’t trust the Buick factory manual, whom can you trust? I decided to go on line and see what I could find. I found a site that you ask a certified GM mechanic and if you are happy with his answer you pay a pre-determined fee. His answer was the same. The guy asking the question responded several times saying the piston would not go back in even with excessive force. Obviously this guy was reading the manual. Now I am real frustrated with all of this false information. I decided to call a buddy of mine that teaches auto tech at the local Tech collage. He started laughing uncontrollably. He said the new manuals are all written from prior information and copied and sometimes parts are left out. Any new stuff is written from engineer’s diagrams etc. The guy writing the book has never seen the car he is writing the manual for. After wasting about a half hour researching this I went out and changed out the rotors and pads. I took about fifteen minutes per side. Beware of the manuals sometimes they lie. Mud

[JohnD1956]

They changed those rear set up's a lot back then. I wonder what year they started the set up where the parking brake is a brake shoe that contacts the hub of the rotor? I could swear I saw that on a 2000 Regal. Thats a nice set up and the manual would have been correct.

[60FlatTop]

The smaller Eldorado's with disc brakes on the rear and Fiero's integrated the parking brake. We still call it an emergency brake around here so a lot of us didn't care if it worked or not; just a state inspection aggravation.

We all got one of those awkward square spanner adjusting tools to screw the piston in with and then learned the hard way that you have to set and release the parking park a few times to set the initial adjustment- or.... you couldn't get ant pedal.

Fiero? Yeah, I had one of those too with a 4.3 Chevy truck engine. That was the small block with two cylinders lopped off. You almost got V8 power without cutting into the shock tower. Should have kept that neat little car.

Bernie

[old-tank]

Mud

That was your first mistake --- reading the manual. I usually only try to find it after I am totally mired in do-do. 15 minutes per side is all it took for a ford product recently...after 4 trips to town to get the right size torx bit.

Willie

[NTX5467]

You might also find some DIY vids on YouTube, too. I got industious and changed the air filter in my Y2K Impala a while back. Already had the filter. Not wanting to really disturb the many rubber items in the air intake system, I did the least-invasive thing I figured I could do . . . except things didn't move enough. I did manage to get the old filter out and the new one crammed in there. Took about an hour! I then looked for a DIY video and that whole video was about 2.5 minutes long, but they wrestled a lot more stuff out of the way than I figured I could get away with.

Happy New Year!

NTX5467

[Mudbone]

Mud

That was your first mistake --- reading the manual. I usually only try to find it after I am totally mired in do-do. 15 minutes per side is all it took for a ford product recently...after 4 trips to town to get the right size torx bit.

Willie

I guess I just wanted to justify purchasing the service manual, Wrong!