greasing front caliper pins

well done, thanks!

 

Other things you can look at while you're there include the "fitting kit" ... that's Toyota-ese for the little springy clips that sit in the notches of the caliper mounting bracket, for the "ears" of the brake pads to slide in.

Those clips are not lubed with anything wet (it would just be a grit magnet), but when they are new they have a dry slippery black coating of some sort of Teflon-like stuff. When they get rusty, they can also interfere with the pads sliding smoothly and releasing. It's not hard to check that the pads still slide easily; as long as they do, there's no need to change the clips, but when you find they have gone rough, it's an easy, cheap fix.

If you buy a caliper rebuild kit from Toyota (one kit has all the rubber boots and seals and miscellaneous fiddly bits for both calipers) then you will not only be able to inspect your boots and seals for any cracks or punctures, but you'll have replacements on hand so you can fix what you found right away. Again, there's no need to use any new parts from the kit as long as the old parts are fine. But it's nice if you can find a problem and it doesn't have to turn into a shopping trip while your car is apart.

Also, the kit will include a little packet of the correct grease for the caliper pins (and the piston seals, if you ever open and rebuild the caliper itself). That's a red, "lithium soap-based glycol grease" that is compatible with Toyota's rubber formulas, and you can buy whole tubes of it, but you might never need to when there's always a packet of it in the rubber parts kit.

 

The thickness variation is likely due to caliper pins drying out.

When was the last time you lubed the caliper pins? Toyota Canada says to do a full brake service bi-yearly or 32K kms, whichever comes first.



Besides the kosher pin lube shown by @chapman, Sil-Glyde Brake Lubricant works well, is readily available, and does not swell rubber.

For brake pads, shims and caliper points of contact, an anti-seize compound (Permatex for one) works well.

I've attached an excerpt from the Canadian 2014 model year Supplemental Booklet, happens to be the most recent I have.

 

The Sil-Glyde stuff might be perfectly fine; I don't know one way or the other, I'm not on any kind of mission to say it isn't.

According to its manufacturer page, it "is a silicone-based brake lubricant recommended for the entire brake assembly, is compatible with plastic and rubber (EPDM & Nitrile)".

I do not know whether Toyota's rubber brake parts are EPDM, nitrile, or some other formula.

I do know that the Toyota manual could certainly specify a silicone grease if they wanted to, they do in other places, but for their caliper pistons and slide pins, they take pains to specify a different formula, lithium soap-based glycol.

I don't know why. I didn't make the engineering decision. But there it is.

Obviously, Mendel uses the Sil-Glyde and likes it, and hasn't seen any trouble from it. I'm cool with that. There are times I choose to do something a different way than the manual specified, too.

Sometimes I even post about a way I do something that is different from what's in the manual. But when I do, I'll say "this is something I do that's different from what's in the manual, and what the manual says is X, and my reason for doing this other thing is Y." That way, anybody reading my post knows what the original spec is, and is able to judge whether my reason for not following it is convincing to them.

Now, I'm not a moderator here, or in any position to police anybody else's writing style, but I just don't see why that isn't a sort of minimally-expected level of disclosure, when recommending a procedure that's known to be different from the spec.

A tube of Sil-Glyde seems to be about $9, a tube of 08887-01206 seems to be about $11 at McGeorge Toyota (for anyone buying a tube, and not just using the packets of it that come in the parts kits).

 

Yeah it's just I'm doing some Honda brakes too, and probably a Mazda before long: I know Honda has a proprietary lube, and likely Mazda as well. I've got one tube of sil-glyde, probably gonna outlast me lol.