How to Install Hawk Performance Ceramic Brake Pads on a C7 StingRay Z51 Corvette

Hello everyone, welcome to the channel, today I'm going to show you how to

install

high

performance

ceramic

brake

pads

on a c7 Corvette, so let's talk a little bit about what we're going to have to do to do this

brake

change on this one. c7 Corvette one, you will need a low profile jack so you can get under the car and be able to lift it safely and then you will want to make sure you have jack stands so you can get it underneath. the car while you have it up and with the wheels removed today I am going to replace the front and rear

pads

and I am also going to replace the front rotors.

The rotors were worn pretty poorly on this car. the rear ones are still in very good shape so I won't be replacing them as far as tools go. You really don't need a lot of tools to be able to do this. You will have to be able to. to lift it you're going to have to be able to take the wheels off, okay those are pretty simple and straightforward agreements right there, you don't have what I can think of that you're going to need, you're going to need a Hammer and you're going to need a punch that has a hollow point on the top. lead.

The Brembo brake system has two chrome pins that actually lock the pads in place with a spring and are pushed from the back of the caliper. and of course you have a nice, pretty painted clamp and you don't want it to lift up, so if you try to use a flat or pointed punch to get them out, it will slide off and then you'll end up chipping your paint so you can get them at Harbor Freight. I picked up this little kit from here, bring it to the camera so you can see it was $3.99, it's nice and it has the hollow tips on the top.

So you'll be able to center it right on the pin and just tap it out and it won't require a lot of pressure to do it, it just locks them in, locks the spring in place and holds the pads right where they are. It's supposed to, besides this and a hammer, that's all you'll need. Now let me talk about everything we were doing here when I decided I was going to get the new rotors. Well I was in I was in Funland trying to figure this out, apparently the 2014 models have crossovers here, maybe two different versions, possibly even three, so even using the VIN number, when I called GM parts and talked to them, I tried do it from their website and they gave me two different variations, actually three different variations for my car, I hope you don't have that problem, but on mine they made one that has an almost two piece rotor design, which is what I have , which has nine spokes, so you have a central hub and then you have the outer rotor.

Now apparently the next generation got rid of that and is more of a solid rotor, just traditional, so I didn't know which one to buy, so we could. I was able to go look at my car and be able to tell them what I was seeing, then they were able to give me the correct part number and now something else I want to point out because when I do this, when I do this. With all of this, I try to make sure that you guys know how to do it, but how to save some money in the process.

Now I called my local dealer here in Sacramento to see my other video where it was still being edited but I changed the battery and the battery was actually cheaper the dealer heard than anywhere else but when I called the dealer this time for the rotors, they wanted one hundred and eighty-seven dollars per rotor. I was now able to get a genuine AC Delco part exactly what I was going to get from the online dealer and this had to be through Van Chevrolet in Arizona and they sold them to me for a hundred dollars and 93 cents each. a significant change and they got it, it's a lot cheaper, and they delivered it to me in a couple of days, so maybe I'm not in a big rush, it wasn't a big deal, so basically I almost got a rotor completely free, so just be consider. do a little shopping and you can do it and of course we are going to make the Hawk Performance brake pads, the

ceramic

pads.

The reason I went for this was last year, when When I went, when Jennifer and I went to SEMA, there was a representative there and I was able to talk to them. I was able to get information on them and a big part of it is that they are a very high

performance

platform, but there is also very, very little dust and any of you that are still working on the pads that can't come with the car you have the Red Book that came with the car, they know what I'm talking about, they know You can drive it 25 feet and you already have brake dust, so mine is no different and I love my chrome wheels.

I'm sure you guys love yours, whether they're black, chrome, carbon or whatever. but it irritates you so much that you can't keep them clean. I mean, I polished my car before I went to a car show. I drive to the car show. I have to go clean them all again so basically you We're getting the performance but we're also getting low brake dust so these are the problems they love the bigger the rear ends can look but they accepted Go ahead and sponsor the channel today and I really appreciate it. Lindsay, I really appreciate it, she's their marketing director with them and she's supporting the channel and I really appreciate it so I just wanted to be able to post that and thank you all for that because without our sponsors we couldn't.

To bring you the videos that we make, I just wanted to thank you in advance, so anyway, we're going to go ahead and jump into the video now and show it to you. Really, how simple it is to change these pads and you know, take your time, make sure that when you know there's a place under the car that's made just for the jacket, Pat, don't roll that Jack right under it. and then start lifting it up because you're going to start messing up some things, but there's a place underneath that's big enough to be able to get under, so we're going to go ahead and lift the car up and start lifting it up.

Here's how things go, before we start, let me tell you a little about Hawk's performance. High performance has been around for about 25 years, a little bit longer than that, and they make street pads, they also make track pads, so they've been in racing. They've known what they're doing with brakes for a long time and everyone I've talked to swears by them. They think they are fantastic brakes. It tickles me so much to be able to put them on today and I'll be able to tell you more as we go and I'll bring you an update that there are several versions of how you know.

I mean I have a z51 and the z06 has certain types of brakes and also the Grand Sport and you know they also have brake pads and they are much bigger so while we do this hopefully we can get sponsorship to be able to do it again and to those cars we will show. because they're a little bit different than the way they're made and then at that point we'll be able to give you some updates on how my brakes are working so the first thing to do before you start doing it. the brakes if you want to go ahead and take the cap off the reservoir here and take it off and then put a towel or a paper towel or something around the opening here so that it catches any fluid that might rise to the top and overflow so I'm going to put a paper towel here so I can catch it, but I don't think I'll have that problem, so now that I've taken the gas cap off, what I'm going to do is I'm going to lift the car up a little bit to take some pressure off the tire and lug nuts and then I'm going to press "Continue" and loosen the lug nuts before it comes up completely. the tire lifts off the ground otherwise I will have to struggle to remove the lug nuts so I am using a low profile jack that goes directly to the lifting point, if you have one of the lifting discs go ahead and use that not I have them, I've never had to use them because my microphone jack actually has a small enough pad to fit in the right place, so let's go ahead and turn it up a little bit. and then we will remove the nuts and the rim.

One thing you might want to note here is that I have the rim like this so the reason behind this is that on the front I'm going to also be changing the rotors so to do that you have to remove two big bolts so we can take the rotor off. removing the caliper and these two bolts hold the caliper. and it has a bracket and they're extremely tight so if you're not using an impact gun or something and you're doing it by hand you're going to have to get some leverage here so I've turned the wheel out so I can get in here with my breaker bar and be able to have enough leverage to loosen those bolts otherwise you're too quarter tight here if your wheel is totally straight it's just too tight a core you're not I'm going to be able to do it so I just wanted to let you know ahead of time so you have it because we're going to lift this up, we're going to put it on a stand and we don't want to spin the wheels of the car while we're on the jack stand, so I'm just lifting the car here a little bit, just enough to take the weight off. , but there is a tire that still does not rotate. at that point we're going to loosen all of our lug nuts, okay, like this, and at that point we can go ahead, we can continue jacking up the car now.

I would recommend you get under the jack after you've done it. it's up there a little bit, just double check to make sure your jack hasn't slipped, hasn't moved, everything is working on payment, you can pick it up off the ground now that the tire itself isn't on the ground and spin now , so we can go ahead and remove the lug nuts, so now we have our lug nuts here, so I'm going to go ahead and remove the tire and once we get it out of the way, so we get Get it out of here now before we put it back together. all.

I have a car show coming up and in a couple of days I'll be filming this on Friday and I have a car show on Sunday and I'm going to move on. Before I put everything back together, I'm going to clean everything, everything will be nice and clean here in the caliper and then I'll take the wheel out on the grass and wash everything all the way down. nooks and crannies where the lug nuts go, all on the back and on the side, on the back of the tire, to make everything look nice and shiny again, that's what it looks like with the wheel anyway. off, so we're just going to take a jack stand underneath here and put it on.

I put that jack stand right under the spring, right in front, right in front here and I'm going to go ahead and turn on my GoPro here and then. That way you should be able to have a good view of the back so you can see exactly what I'm doing. The next thing we want to do is have to stick these two little pins in. Right out here and those are going to come out and come out the back and then we'll take them out. Those are the ones that hold this spring that keeps the pads in place so you know you don't want these to be sharp. point or a little point on these pins and if you use a flat pin, a flat punch, you're probably going to end up scratching, you know, chipping the paint off your caliper so you can get them at Harbor Freight and they just have a little notch here at the end of the tip so you can put it here on the tip and it doesn't go anywhere and that way you can hit here with your hammer, so now I'm I'm going to do that with these and then I'll follow it up with a smaller tip that will go all the way through to right and out because these are not too narrow tips, so it won't go all the way.

All the way, let's do the next thing, that's right, okay, now at that point we have these two pins here, as you can see here, hopefully, on the GoPro, you can see them, okay, we'll take them out now, use some pliers. here you can use whatever you need just to be able to get on them and pull them out, then you can help by tapping this spring, you can push the spring in a little bit with your finger, these things are pretty tight, but you can pull them out onto these pins, you want to make sure don't pinch your finger there, so take it directly to that point, there you can get the pin out of there now, do the same on this one, it's like that.

Okay, at that point, what you're going to do is the pads are tight against the rotor right now, so we're going to take them and we're going to push the road or the pad all the way up against the metal of the caliper. Now this is a little bit difficult to do, putting a lot of pressure here and you want to make sure that you see that the spring just came loose and was stuck there under these little weights, so you just want to make sure that you don't do that. So you don't get your finger pinched there, you can grab this one and you're going to pull back, it's like you're going to get to the point where it can't go any further than what you're going to do.

Are you going to go back and do it again here because some of the fluid that you took out of this one came back into the Pistons over here, so you're going to push it again and you can see what's happening and you can slowly move them back until finally they all come in in the tank and then you can push, push. on one and pull on the other until they're both completely compressed, that's right, okay, at that point these little guys fall out, so we're going to go and we have to take these two bolts right here now if you're just doing a if you were just doing a pad change, wouldn't be greatthing at this point, you would be almost done, you would just turn around, clean all this up and put them on, put the lube on the grease. on the back of the pad, put the pad back on, put the spring back on, that's it, okay, but these rotors are pretty well run in so I decided to replace them and with that being said, we have to take the this bolt and these two bolts I should say and it's a 21 millimeter bolt and like I was telling you, the reason I did this to turn the wheel all the way out is because if without it, you can see here, there's just no way to get any leverage. if you turned there, you can probably get your wrench or your ratchet in there, so it's here, these two bolts don't have to go in, so let's see if I can get in there and get some leverage here.

So now, of course, if you have an impact, you can probably do it and it would probably be fine, but instead I try not to use the impact things, but they're tight and once you get them or they break. free and then you can turn and get on your ratchet and your baby, okay, you gotta be careful not to catch this big brake line here, you don't want to break it, so you should be able to use a ratchet. Guys, these things are really tight, so keep in mind that he once changed the brakes on a c5 Corvette.

I had a 99 c5 Corvette and changed the brakes and bolts on the rear doing exactly this. so tight that I couldn't free them with a half inch impact and they ended up having to take it to a shop and pay them to loosen those bolts and they used a three quarter inch impact gun, but it still didn't work. They were so tight that I don't know how they didn't break, they ended up having to use a big, old, huge breaker bar that was about three and a half feet long, it was crazy and they were a guy that was like three times my size. he was hanging on the breaker bar, so listen like crazy, I'm not tired yet, you know what you want to do is make sure you don't drop this clamp, it's probably the weight of this clamp if you drop it. it would break this line, the brake line and the replacement is not good, there is a bolt, the second one, and we're just going to remove it and put it on the side, we can rest it right against the arm, so now we have it done. well, we have here, let me turn the wheel a little bit, we have a t30 torque here now, hopefully, you can see that on this camera here there is a t30 torque right here that you're going to have to release and it shouldn't It won't be that tight, but what I did was take a screwdriver and you're going to fit the screwdriver here a little bit.

Hold it a little bit, okay, okay, and that's just what's holding the rotor. Okay, take the rubber mallet if so. it doesn't come, this one just came for free, okay, great, if it doesn't then it has a little bit of rust or something retained and you can guess that here on the back of the rotor it will come off right away, so we have already taken it out, so now what we can do is we can go ahead and put the other one, the other rotor, here's our other rotor and we want to line up that pilot hole that's going to hold right there, right here it lines up to go back in.

Hey, and again, these don't have to be very tight and if you don't have that signal, they go anywhere once the mill turns on, but it keeps everything aligned when you start taking things apart, so now everything you need is What we're doing now is reversing all of this, so we're just going to take the clamp and put it back in place. We're going to tighten the bolt so that the bolts are exactly as they were. The same thing doesn't matter which one is up or down, so now we have a nice, comfortable fit, but we have reduced torque and the torque setting for these is 162 pounds in the front or 89 for the rears, but we're not going. to do the back parts today, that's all.

I'm going to do it on the front ones, we're just going to do the pads on the back, so I have to keep that there, there's a very, very, very tight space for air, so here. we're going good here we're going good, so now we have the screws back on. I've already taken care of everything, so now the only thing I have to do now and I don't want to I have to do it, but what I want to do is wash, wash this clamp, get all the residue off of it, so I'm just going to clean it and leave it all nice and pretty again.

I have a, I'm just using a glass cleaner here, I cleaned all of this and then I have a little brush here that I'm just going to use to clean all the little nooks and crannies real quick, so now with everything we've got, we've gotten rid of of These super dusty brake pads, hoping that we don't have this anymore and I don't have to be cleaning my calipers all the time so I hope they are nice and nice and clean and stay that way so now she is. ready for the pact, okay, so at that point we have our new pads here, we're just going to put these little guys on top, I'm going to put a little bit of grease on it and you don't need to have a bunch of grease, I mean. it's all, it'll keep the pads from vibrating, but you don't have to put a bunch in there, so you just put it on and I think you see it, so I can show you that we're just Putting it here, a light layer, you're on the backing plate .

I'm going to try to make sure nothing gets into the shoe material or the pad material, just be careful not to get your hands dirty. now all over the pad so the front ones are the same both ways it doesn't matter you can use either of them they both have wear indicators the back one is a little different but you'll just take them as So this will be the starting side for the piston slip that's there like now if the piston has relaxed a little bit and some fluid has gotten in there and you just fit it in a little bit and then you just pull. just pull it towards you and that will push the piston in so at that point you can push it in, that's fine, same with this one.

I'm just going to slide it in grease towards the piston, away from the rotor. it's like that and then you're all set to go at that point, if you have sandpaper, you can use sandpaper or you can just clean up the center pins, okay and then what I want to do is what I want to do. take and I want to have these things lined up pretty well exactly where they're going to go before I start messing with the spring. Okay, now that we have our pads in place, we're going to take out our pin and then we're just going to take our spring and we're going to put it in place, okay, and then we're going to put our top pin in first, it doesn't really matter which one you put in first.

It's just that this one is easier for me to do that one, okay? I'll start right where it goes. We end up having to hit the pin here in a minute, but I'm going to take my thumb and I'm going to push down on this spring, hopefully, you can see it and I'm going to push the pin in, okay, and it's going to go into the spring there and I'm just going to hit this thing that holds the spring. I need to tap that down and then once you've got that started you need to drive these pins all the way in and that's all you want to make sure of and I'm going to grab the GoPro now so I can try to show you what I'm trying to do.

I mean, I hope you can see here that this spring is not quite centered on the retaining pin, so what you need to do is make sure that it moves. there, that's what's keeping it from coming loose right there there it's in that groove right there and right there this one is already right where it belongs so you can see that hopefully I filmed it well now that she's done, you can see that These two pins here now they're sticking out from where they belong, so now that the brakes are done, I'm going to go ahead and take the front tire out in the front yard, clean it all up and then bring it back and we'll put it back on okay, like this that we have the wheel clean and we are going to put it back, and you have to be a little careful when putting it back with the wheel turned so that you don't go. to end up hitting the caliper and chipping it, so you just have to be careful, just stick it in there and take your time and turn the rotor a little bit here to get it right where it needs to go, there you go.

If you notice this, I'm tightening them in a star shape and I hope that the tire seats or the wheel seats in the hub correctly, they don't get stuck in any way, okay, now we have that good fit, so now that we've got the bolts back on the tire, they're not tight with their fit, we're just going to go ahead and get under the car and grab the jack stand, pull it out. of the road is fine and at that point we can lower the car a little bit, you could probably lower it all the way.

I just get it right up to the point where the tires are touching or I can adjust everything just right, so I set my luck. I'm going to tighten them up, set them to a hundred pounds and then once I have them all and I turn around, just double check them, make sure you get a false positive quickly and we're good to go, so we've got our Jack right where it goes , let's go ahead and get Jack, the car here, the tire off the ground, okay, make sure it's not moving all over the place, everything is jacked up, safely, let's go ahead and I'll go. to put a jack stand under here and then I'm going to move my stuff out of the way so I can go over there like this link coming towards us and then we're going to go ahead and undo the bolts now that we're.

I only replaced the pads on the rear, so it will go much faster than the front. He told me it was a lot easier, but the rotors weren't and like that shape, they actually weren't in very good shape, so you'll probably find that. do it yourself the front wheels do most of the braking so you don't wear out the rear wheels as often and once that's done i'll take this wheel out and we'll rub it with one of the mr. The clean pads on the interior remove all debris from the interior so I will be taking it to a car show like I mentioned before.

I want to make sure that we can score some extra points so that the first What we need to do after we remove the steering wheel, jack up the steering wheel and put the jack stand in place is we need to remove these two pins here, hopefully , the GoPro. showing those that are there and we're going to use our punch that has a center point in its socket and we're going to use our hammer to hit them like this, so it goes into the caliper and then we'll follow it. with another punch that would go all the way through and take those pins out the back, if we can get them all the way in, there we go, so at that point I'll see if I can get the GoPro over here so you can see.

Again, this is very similar to the front camera. I'm there, so you can still do better. There we go so you can see these two pins, it's what we just took out, so in this case we're going to take our pliers. just some dams, hey, let's lift them up, so that releases the spring, this will just come out, okay, now you can see here the pads are in place, so everything we're going to do there, you know, they're compressed. we want to make sure we leave room for the new pads because the new pads are going to have a lot more meat on them, so what we want to do is take and we're going to grab this side that We're going to back up to the red part of the clamp, we're going to push this one into that direction to compress the pistons, so we'll just take our hands, just squeeze them, probably go slow.

I can see that, but it moved over the same thing on this side now, if you saw I did that, I pushed this one over this one, I jumped back, back a little bit, so this to the fluid I pushed it in that direction and I came back brushed back . on the piston over here, so you're just going to walk these things back and forth to the point where you're going to end up pulling this way. I'm pushing here at the same time because you're going to try to get the pistons fully compressed okay at that point you're literally just going to pull them out so now hold them keep in mind the outside one is the one with the indicator of squeak, the wear indicator on the back, so the front ones like us.

He said both things happen, so it doesn't really matter, they'll just take them off, but at that point, since we're just replacing the pads on the back a little bit, I'm going to go ahead and clean up. All of this, get it all nice and clean and then I'll put the new pads in here so for those of you who put your car in a car show, this is the perfect opportunity to be able to get your calipers nice and shiny. worth showing again, you know, I hope that since we're not supposed to get the brake dust that we understand that we won't have that as a problem anymore and that we can have it, we don't have to worry about it, so you can make these pads brake pretty quickly if that's all you're doing it's just the brake pads no.

I saw some videos out there someone says, oh yeah, you can make brake pads in about nine minutes, well, yeah, you can probably do that. You know, if that was all you were doing and everything aside and you started your watch right there, you could probably do it. that, but you know, if you have totake your time, clean it up, do it the right way, it will take a little longer, but things don't take that long, okay? What we have to do is take our pads and remember that the one with the indicator on the edge of the edge, the wear indicator is the one that will go on the outside edge and the one that doesn't have it will go on the back, so let's just go a take some grease, we're going to put the grease on the backing plate, you don't have to get carried away with that grease, that's more than enough, you're just going to take your finger and spread it all over the backing plate.

You want to make sure this doesn't reach the surface of the brake. You do not want it. You don't want it here. This will prevent the bricks from squeaking at you. Okay, I literally fed on this side. It's going to go towards the piston right here, look right here, this is going to go towards the piston, this is going to be myself, like the outer pad, so I put it there like this, okay, and then we'll take our pins. We'll just line them up, make sure everything lines up ahead of time, okay, so we don't have to fight it when we get the spring there, it should be fine like this, look there, so at that point.

Let's take our spring, put it like this. Hey, and then we're going to take this pin here. I'm going to push the spring down and go like this, like this, like this, okay, look how that came in. So at that point, what we have to do is just hit the pins with a hammer. Now we just need to hit the pins with a hammer. Now when you go to do this, it will be much easier to do. Trying to do it by keeping my head out of the way and you know everything else, so it's a little bit harder here, it seems a little bit harder and it's like trying to stand here, far away, hopefully, the camera is picking up all this, I think that's okay and you wanted to make sure that this pin goes all the way in where it sticks out on the other side over here almost there okay so we've got our tire on the lesson or a nice clean wheel now yeah let's go ahead and let's put this little guy back in, hey, crazy, again, we're doing this in a star pattern here so that that way it goes into the edge of the cube so you don't end up sitting it in the wrong direction and it ends up driving down the road. like an egg Then, once we have them all adjusted, we can move forward.

We can get the torque wrench. We can get the cat. stick out from under it okay and again we're talking about this with your 5 foot pounder and we're okay and we just got a letter from the cat and here we go and then we have one last thing after we've already done all the brakes the cars went down level, we just want to take our little rag here that we have to put here to catch anything that was going to come out extra. I didn't have, I'm going to go ahead and put. Put the cap back on or voila, if for some reason you are a little low on fluid you will want to go ahead and remove it but chances are like in my case it was low just because the pistons were low due to the size of the brakes .

So once I put them back like new the liquid is right above the neck or belongs right so now we're doing the break in of the pads and what we have to do is we're supposed to go from six to ten . times at about 35 miles per hour and then we gradually come to a moderate stop, so we're going to get here at 35 miles per hour and then we're going to slow down moderately, slow down, approach this, exit, that's the main road here we'll do it again, that's three times, four times, turn it up again, that's five and there's six, okay, so now what we're going to do is what we're going to do. three hard stops at about 45 miles an hour, that's why there are two that just go off the road here, some turn around again and here we go, they should be better at this point, they feel great and stop in a time for the car not to pull, it's great.

I just want to take a second and thank Lindsay from Hawk Performance for sponsoring the Corvette channel today. Without her sponsorship, we wouldn't be able to make amazing videos like the ones we did today, showing how to make these brakes and everything. from our other sponsors who helped us along the way we just couldn't bring the high quality video that we've been bringing so guys, thank you all for sponsoring the Corvette Channel and I really appreciate it, I hope you know that. The Corvette channel is growing every day and I really appreciate all your support. If they haven't subscribed yet, hit the subscribe button, hit the like button, hit the bell button so they know when you post a video.

You'll get a notification, but tell your friends it's been growing all the time. I appreciate it. I love it. It's becoming a little family. I don't really appreciate it. We started a Facebook group and it's growing too, so if you have questions, feel free to ask. If you see something, you want to have a question about something I did in this video or other videos, please contact me in the Corvette Channels Facebook group, contact me here to comment on this particular video and I will put all the Description of all the numbers part brakes, the front brakes and the rear brakes, so you have them all very good, but again, if you have a 2014 and you have some kind of problem trying to figure out what pump.

Please contact me, I'll be happy to help you, okay, I've looked at it, we've resolved it and as you can see, they're all set and everyone's going, so there's no problem after all, so that's it. How to change the front and rear brakes on a Corvette c7. We hope you found this video helpful and informative and if you did, please hit the subscribe button, hit the like button and be sure to hit the bell to be informed of our upcoming uploads. Thanks for watching and have a great night so I have an update for you on the brake pads.

We just finished a 3 day trip to Oregon for the Southern Oregon Corvette Associations Corvette Weekend and put a little over 700 miles on the car and I cleaned it up on Saturday so we could do the car show , so the wheels were nice and shiny chrome at the time and then we went ahead and put about 350 360 miles on it to get back home. and the photos you are about to see are the ones we had when what the wheels looked like when I got home. Well, a little dust on the wheels looks like the typical look it used to have when I drove 25 miles, so I'm very happy that the wheels still look nice and shiny and it was a great idea that I went ahead and put them so hot, says it's a little dusty, they don't fit, so if you want to get rid of that problem with your car.

Go ahead and get a set of those and you'll be happy, I guarantee it guys, thanks for watching, I appreciate it, have a good night. Hi, I'm Jennifer, thank you for watching the intervention.