I'm sorry if this is a stupid question but I'm a little bit intimidated. I have a 94 Firebird Formula making a lot of noise from the driver rear brakes. I've ordered new pads to put on the back but the components in the kit looked very unlike what I'm used to. I had an 02 Camaro before the 'Bird and the rear brake setup looks nothing like the Camaro's. The setup is much more busy with the E-brake lines, and the mechanism looked a bit different as well. So is there a trick or a procedure to changing the rear pads that I should know? It looked like the new pads came with a set of 4 bushings, are these special wear items that differ from a typical slide pin setup like the front calipers?

 

not sure what the bushings are but it should be straight forward, unbolt caliper, pop old brake pads off and install the new ones. lt1 cars don't have a drum ebrake like the 98+ cars do so nothing to worry about there but you do want to make sure your ebrake is not on obviously. it's been a couple years since I've done mine but it was pretty easy from what i remember.

 

When you say unbolt the caliper do you mean at the bracket or at the slide pins? I'm thinking the pins need to be greased either way and it looked like there was a spring assembly or something similar also holding the 2 caliper pieces together.

 

Just did this a few days ago. The spring assembly you mention is the parking brake mechanism. To grease the slide pins your best bet is to unbolt the top slide pin (easy to get to) then unbolt the caliper bracket itself (this is on really tight, 74 ft lbs is spec). At this point the only thing holding the caliper bracket on is the lower slide pin, so pull the whole caliper bracket out which should pull the lower slide pin out as well still attached to the caliper bracket. leave the slide pin exposed and still attached to the caliper.

Reason to do it this way is unless you have a really long hex/torx bit there's no access to the lower slide pin because the parking brake mechanism is in the way. If you unbolt the parking brake mechanism you have to deal with re-compressing that spring and getting everything back into place.

 

Thanks! This worked for the most part, but I wasn't able to expose the bottom slide pin on the driver's side. The E brake assembly got caught up in the coil mount on the rear end so I had to leave the caliper on the car.