The best thing to do is to go out and buy a manual for your car. I have a hanes manual for mine, and its pretty good. Lots of others also buy the dsm cd manuals which I hear are good if you have the book to back it up. Anyhow, buying a manual for your car is a great investment and will get you started to doing everything on your car...

I've been doing all the work on my cars for years, as far as changing pads goes you just jack up the car, remove the wheel, remove the 2 brake caliper bolts, pull the caliper back, pull the old pads off, put the new ones on, take the lid of your brake fluid resivour, suck out about half the fluid (turkey baster works great for that), compress the caliper with a 6" c-clamp (slowly) make sure the resivour doesn't overflow! (Brake fluid eats paint!!!) put the caliper back on, put the 2 bolts on by hand, tighten them down, reinstall the wheel and repeat on the other side. For detailed instructions you might want to look at www.dsm.org If you have any questions you can always PM me. L8R!

Just to add to the above instructions, you can also bring your rotors to Autozone and get it re-surfaced!!!

I'm sorry I missed that one! I'm with gstspyder1998 on that! Pepboys will also resurface (turn) the rotors. The thing is that If you don't have heavy grooving, or hard spots on your rotors it's not necessary, and if you have it done expect to have your car out of service for a large portion of the day!

Nah, I got some fairly good looking rotors from a junkyard for $5 each and had them turned. Put them on at my leisure a few weeks later. Don't forget to bleed th brakes! Gotta get that air out of there.

thanx a lot everyone. i got it all except for the C-clamp compressing process, just never seen it done before. so im off to auto zone tomorrow to get one of them and i'll try it within the next couple of days... wish me luck!!!
also, any specific pads i should get???
Thanx

Originally posted by gstspyder1998
Just to add to the above instructions, you can also bring your rotors to Autozone and get it re-surfaced!!!

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Its called cutting the rotors. I do it at work all the time. However this isn't really needed unless your rotors are out of round. In which case you would have to do one of two things. Cut or Get new ones.
Here is the problem at hand with cutting. Rotors can only be cut to a certain point. If you get a manual it can tell you how big your rotors are suppose to be from front to back ( will need a micrometer for this ). If they are out of factory specs, you will need knew ones. Reason being: If rotors are a milimeter away or more, your caliper won't hit the rotor. Thus no stopping! EKK!
Brakes are things people don't look into to much as a corrisive part on a car. Max life for rotors are 50K normally. Normally people get them sooner because of there driving habits. Racing, City Driving ( a big one no looks at ), Brake torque, using your parking brake like your in a movie, Going from 100 MPH to 0 really quick, etc. All these contribute to brake wear ( obviously ) and will short the life of the rotors.
If your changing the pads note 3 things: 1. MAKE SURE THERE NOT CAR QUEST! They suck.... 1/4 are bad. I #@%#@%#@%#@% you not. You have no idea how many times we call the NAPA guy at work for brakes cause the CQ guys sell #@%#@%#@%#@% brakes. 2. Be ready for any spills. Have rags ready and be sure not to get the brake fluid on the paint. If you hate someone so much..... brake fluid will make there cars paint pay. 3. Do not gorilla clamp the caliper piston, doing this could bust the piston. No piston. No caliper. No brakes.
Just some info.....
Erik

Go to Checker and get Beck/Arnley part # 088-1426M for the front, and 088-1285M for the rear. Make sure you get the ones with the part # that ends with the M and not the D, the part # I just gave you is for Axxis Metal Master pads, the part # with the D on the end is for Axxis Deluxe. The Metal Master pads are $62 for the front, $45 for the rear and come with a lifetime warranty. Stillen Sells these same pads for $80 a pair with no warranty at all. I stumbled across this a while ago when I was getting pads for my car. If you get a old looking box that says Repco Metal Master just make sure that it's the same part # on the end of the box, they are the same compound made by the same company just new old stock! As far as the c-clamp goes you should get that at Home Depot, or Ace Hardware. (Better product cheaper!) Make sure it's a 6" or larger clamp. All you have to do with that is put the non moving side of the clamp on the back of the caliper and put the moving side inside the piston cup and slowly turn in until the piston in the caliper moves back far enough that you can put it over your new pads while in place on the rotor.

As long as you don't open the bleeder valve, you don't have to bleed the brakes. Most of the time the pistons go in quite easily and can ususlly be done with some kind of pry bar. C-clamp also works well if you have one laying around, but its usually not necessary. Also get some silicone or some type of qiueting compound to put on the back of the new pade. It will keep your brakes from being noisy. About the rotors, if they are gouged, depending on the severity they have to be cut. If they feel smooth, you are probably alright. If you need to get new rotors, one thing to be extremely careful with is that the rotors come packed in an oil. You MUST remove all of this oil with Brakleen or something like that. Try stopping with that oil on there....Disc brakes are one of the easiest things to do on the car. Good Luck!

like the others said brakes are pretty easy but i would have to disagree with the hanes manual i bought one and it didnt really help much it seems to be written for people with a moderate knowledge of cars and just asummes that you know what to do. as for cheap brakes (which i do not recomend) i got rotors and pads for all four wheels for under $100 from pepboys when i needed something cheap you may have to ask for the cheap stuff cuz they didnt tell me at first and tryed to give me $70 rotors but the do have them for like $14.