Disc Brake Caliper Slide Pin Grease(Lube)? Gen2

Careful there, I don't think -80609 is any of: lithium, soap, glycol, or red.

08887-01206 is the red, lithium soap based glycol grease, recommended for the piston seals and boots and slide pins.





If you don't want to own a tube of it, any time you buy a Toyota caliper rebuild kit (one kit has all the rubber parts and other fiddly bits for a pair of calipers), the kit includes a little pouch of the same grease.

The 08887-80609 "disc brake grease" seems to be a different stuff, recommended for pad ears and shims (metal-to-metal contact areas). I think it is gray, and I am not sure of its composition. It may be a silicone, for all I know. You get a pouch of the gray stuff any time you buy a Toyota shim kit.

(The normal brake service instructions do not have any grease added on pad ears, but just on the shims; the Teflon-like coating of the support plates is supposed to be slippery enough and not attract grit, but greasing the ears is suggested in a TSB that can be applied if the brakes rattle annoyingly.)

For the red stuff, I think somebody on some forum somewhere had identified a Molykote product that might be the same stuff, though I don't know if you could obtain it in less than a bucket.

-Chap

Edit: another post from several years ago included a clarifying letter from Toyota Ireland in response to a question about the two greases.

 

04478-47050 (-47070 for later model Gen 2s).

When you go directly to parts.toyota.com like that, you see list prices. Many dealers sell at discounts.

 

slider pins are not particularly picky about type of grease as long as they have some. It's a hardened steel pin sealed with a rubber boot, I have used Permatex, or other synthetic greases with no issues for years.

 

In cases where manufacturers do recommend a specific grease for slide pins, it seems to be the "rubber" boot that guides their choice, rather than the steel of the pin.

 

There are some lubes that unfortunately swell rubber, including the rubber collars on some guide pins. The (unmentionable) aftermarket lube I use does not.

 

My main reason for putting quotes around "rubber" above was to serve as a reminder that there are as many chemistries of "rubber" as there are of "plastic". And different manufacturers, who are in the business of selecting the "rubber" they use, also make recommendations regarding the grease to use around that "rubber", for reasons that they know and we don't.

I'm not hoping to make any product "unmentionable". I'm just trying to avoid the disservice to PriusChat readers that is done when questions about the recommended greases for Toyota's brakes are answered without saying what the recommended greases are.

 

I have heard the same thing.

This is what Eric O from South Main Auto YouTube channel uses all the time.

http://shop.advanceautoparts.com/p/permatex-ceramic-extreme-brake-parts-lubricant-8-oz-24125/16160018-P

 

To be honest, before my first Prius, I had pretty much one tube of silicone grease (it's a big tube, I doubt I'll ever use it up) that I would use for anything and everything around a brake. I have not heard of it seizing up a slide pin, or experienced any such problem myself. Silicones can be mightily high-temperature tolerant.

My tube of the Toyota red is also large enough that it will likely become part of my estate.

I go on about the Toyota rubber grease more for reasons of principle. I am not convinced that dire fates will befall anyone who uses a different type. I just think that, as long as Toyota has given a clear recommendation—and they have—people who come to PriusChat for the info have a right to be told what the recommendation is, even if we then say whatever we like about our favorite substitutes. That way readers have the info and aren't making their decisions on half the story.

 

I agree Chap, it is important to know what the manufacturer recommends and it is also nice to know why they recommend what they do and if you should depart from their recommendation you are doing so at your own risk.
My guess is if you are at a shop doing work they will have one type of grease they use on everything.

 

Interesting variation, Toyota vs Honda, for lubrication in the "faying" surfaces, between pad backs, shims and calipers contact points.

Toyota indicates to use just a couple of dabs, of the same stuff as the caliper pins: say quarter-sized by 1~2 mm thick, between pad back and shim next to it.

Honda recommends a continuous, edge-to-edge coating of all faying surfaces, pad back to shim, to caliper fingers. The dealerships locally would use Permatex Anti-Seize (or Honda equiv?), sometimes silver, sometimes copper.

Either method seems to work fine.

 

I think it's relevant to add the interest in an alternative because the tube is $37 (when bought at a discount!), and is too much for a single brake job.

 

Where are you finding that? Everything I've seen from Toyota has the red, lithium soap glycol "rubber grease" on the caliper pins (and piston, and rubber seals and boots) and the gray stuff on the pad backs and shims.

When you buy the rubber parts kit, a pouch of the red stuff comes in it. When you buy a shim kit, a pouch of the gray stuff comes in it.

I haven't run across a Toyota document that says to use the same stuff both places.

Fair point. I bought my first Toyota in 2008, so my tube of rubber grease has cost me about twenty-eight cents per month so far, and decreasing.

-Chap

 

I did see it "somewhere", but yeah, guilty of sloppy posting. Both 2nd and 3rd gen use two distinct descriptions, the one for pins the other for pad backs and shims. Gen 2 Repair Manual excerpt:



I've seen a picture somewhere recently, showing 2 quarter sized blobs on the back of pad, and I thought the Lithium soap... description. Have a vague recollection it was a brake TSB.

Anyways, sorry for the red herring.

 

Could have been the Corolla/Matrix TSB that I posted the other day.

But it still says to use shim grease on the shims (says to install new shims, shim grease is supplied in a pouch in the shim kit), and lithium soap glycol grease on the pins.



...



(Those are two different excerpts from the TSB; they just happened to look like A. B. C. in sequence!)

The TSB was for Corolla/Matrix cars suffering from a pad-related groan or squeak noise; I don't think it was intended to suggest that every brake job requires a brand new shim kit. I generally reuse mine. My brakes don't make noise.

 

Found this old info:
Lithium soap base glycol grease? | Bob Is The Oil Guy

 

That page has been over there at Bob Is The Oil Guy for several years now, and it has been mentioned here before (for example, here).

It has never quite been explained. It's clearly an image of some actual Toyota documentation page that's been drawn on. It hasn't been found (as far as I know) anywhere other than that specific Russian site (and now here, regrettably, where it will probably continue to mislead more people). Where it was linked on BITOG, the citations given were to "BR004-00" and "BR94-004", which look kinda sorta like Toyota document numbers but I never found such documents and I'm not aware anybody else did.

Meanwhile, the other citations given in this thread (and others here on PriusChat) are to genuine Toyota documents that can be found, including more recent ones, and that continue to identify the red lithium-soap-based glycol grease, 08887-01206, as the correct grease, which is also the stuff that comes in the Toyota caliper rebuild kits, and inside a Toyota caliper out of the box.