2007 - ~2012 Honda CRV Rear Brakes

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Jul 14, 2020
Messages
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South of Metro Atlanta
What highly intelligent, over-educated tongue-depressor chewing individual came up with this brake pad / retaining clip design on the rears of these vehicles????

For all things that are the holy grail of idiocy....

You literally need 4 hands to get the inboard pad put in the caliper on these things. You also take an extremely high chance of puncturing the piston seal with the stupid spring clips that are on the back of the pad, that get squeezed into the piston cylinder in the caliper.

What a ridiculous design.
 
It is a very common design for Euro cars as well. The prongs exist to prevent noise; they are intended to hold the pads tightly to minimize vibration.
 
Honda and other OEMs have been using that design for many years. GM used a simlar design for many years. Its nowhere near as hard as you make it out to be. If you cant figure out how to correctly clip a brake pad into the caliper, perhaps you should reconsider touching the most important safety system on a vehicle yourself.
 
I just use my fingers to compress the prongs a bit... 99.9% of new pads have prongs that are beyond unnecessary given their intended function.

Compress the fingers a bit by hand, and the pad pops right in, secure as could be.
 
Our daughter is a rural mail carrier and has a 2007 CRV. She has at least 100 stops/day and those pads get changed every 6 months or less. Can't tell you how many sets it has gone through. They wear out quickly whether ceramic or semi-metallic. I put a set of semi-metallic s on my wife's Mazda 5 at 70K and I rechecked them when I rotated the tires. They still look like new pads. Maybe honda's are just hard on brakes.
 
I’m pretty sure these were the original pads and rotors. 171,900 miles.

My wife’s 2007 CR-V ran 105k on the original rear pads before someone hit it and totaled it. They had plenty of meat left.
 
Honda and other OEMs have been using that design for many years. GM used a simlar design for many years. Its nowhere near as hard as you make it out to be. If you cant figure out how to correctly clip a brake pad into the caliper, perhaps you should reconsider touching the most important safety system on a vehicle yourself.

It's funny that Honda, nor anyone else I can think of or have seen (not including Euro stuff) uses these types of retainers on their pads anymore. That's why I ended the year range about 2017.

I find it funny that you claim it's nowhere as hard as I make it out to be when you feel like there's plenty of rubber brake line hose length on the rear calipers on this year range CR-V. There's barely enough hose to lift the caliper off the bracket, much less handle the caliper with one hand while the other is putting this crazy pad in it, making sure the upper clip has been pushed up to allow the pad to go all the way to the top and get three prongs into the piston at the same time while being careful not to pierce the seal on the piston.

Yes, now that I've done it twice in one day, I am certainly much more familiar with the process it takes to do it successfully and efficiently.... I had never done the rear brakes on a vehicle of this year range before. How many have you done?
 
It's funny that Honda, nor anyone else I can think of or have seen (not including Euro stuff) uses these types of retainers on their pads anymore. That's why I ended the year range about 2017.

I find it funny that you claim it's nowhere as hard as I make it out to be when you feel like there's plenty of rubber brake line hose length on the rear calipers on this year range CR-V. There's barely enough hose to lift the caliper off the bracket, much less handle the caliper with one hand while the other is putting this crazy pad in it, making sure the upper clip has been pushed up to allow the pad to go all the way to the top and get three prongs into the piston at the same time while being careful not to pierce the seal on the piston.

Yes, now that I've done it twice in one day, I am certainly much more familiar with the process it takes to do it successfully and efficiently.... I had never done the rear brakes on a vehicle of this year range before. How many have you done?
Are they the little clips that are like a weird W shape almost and clip over the pads? If so, they're still using them. Our 2019 Odyssey has them and yeah, they were a ****in PITA.
 
Ford’s used this type of pad retaining system for years. You just need to be careful to make sure the prongs go into the caliper piston and not the boot/seal/bore.
 
It's funny that Honda, nor anyone else I can think of or have seen (not including Euro stuff) uses these types of retainers on their pads anymore. That's why I ended the year range about 2017.

I find it funny that you claim it's nowhere as hard as I make it out to be when you feel like there's plenty of rubber brake line hose length on the rear calipers on this year range CR-V. There's barely enough hose to lift the caliper off the bracket, much less handle the caliper with one hand while the other is putting this crazy pad in it, making sure the upper clip has been pushed up to allow the pad to go all the way to the top and get three prongs into the piston at the same time while being careful not to pierce the seal on the piston.

Yes, now that I've done it twice in one day, I am certainly much more familiar with the process it takes to do it successfully and efficiently.... I had never done the rear brakes on a vehicle of this year range before. How many have you done?
Pull the 12mm bolt that bolts the hose to the bracket behind the rotor and you have more flexible hose length than you would ever need. The reason that design is no longer used is because Honda went away from the drum-in-hat parking brake that was used on the CR-V to mechanical and electronic parking brakes integrated into the caliper which require a solid piston.
 
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