To jack up the rear of the car, use the rear differential.
As with the front, place the jack stands inboard of the pinch welds along the side of the car.
A side view of the jack stand placement.
Remove the rear wheels. It looks very similar to the front setup.
In the case of the 2-pot rears, the pads are held in place in much the same fashion as the front. There are two pins, a backing plate and a thin wire.
Remove the thin wire. This will allow you to slide the two large pins out. As with the front, be careful during this step as the backing plate can go flying.
If you have difficulty, Subaru was nice enough to stamp these pins with a Phillips slot.
The hardware for the rear.
The rear pads ready to be removed.
Like with the fronts, if you’re replacing the rotors, the calipers need to be removed. In the rear, this done by removing two 14 mm bolts. They are located on the inboard side of the caliper, at the top and bottom. They can be a bit hard to see as they’re tucked along the side of the hub backing plate but they’re easy to remove. There’s no need to zip tie the rear calipers up, you can place them safely on the rear suspension.
Before attempting to remove the rear rotors, MAKE SURE THE PARKING BRAKE IS OFF! I fought for 30 minutes trying every trick in the book to remove the rear rotor until I realized I left the sodding parking brake on.
If you have an issue removing the rotor, you can use a bolt to push it away from the hub. Conveniently, the long bolt holding the spare tire down fits the bill nicely.
The rear rotor removed. You can see the parking brake assembly.
As with the front, clean the hub before you put the new rotor on. If the instructions that came with your rotors call for them to be cleaned, do that now.
Once you’ve mounted the new rotors, replace the caliper.
How it should look from the front.
As with the front (I’m saying that a lot here), you’ll need to push the brake pistons back before you can put the new pads in place. I used the same old pad I used for the front because it was larger and gave me more leverage.
Make sure you lubricate the back of the rear pads using high temperature brake lubricant before you put them in the caliper.
Clean the two large pins and the backing plate using some penetrating lubricant. Lubricate the two large pins using some high temperature brake lubricant.
This diagram shows how the rear brake are assembled.
For future reference,
26633*B = 26633FA010
26633*A = 26633FA000
Everything back together, the purple lubricant gets everywhere.
Go over the rear brakes one more time making sure everything is tight.
All done with the rears.
Put the rear wheels back on and hand tighten the lug nuts. Lower the car and torque the lug nuts down. 80 ft-lbs is tight enough.
After everything is done, get in and start the car. DO NOT MOVE IT YET! Your brake pedal will be very soft. Give it a few pumps until it gets stiff. Once you’re confident in your pedal stiffness, move the car slowly checking that the brakes actually work and there’s no loud noises indicating that something went very very wrong.
Bed your brakes in as per manufacturer recommendations. It can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer but here it is in a nutshell.
Drive to a safe, straight, high speed road (a lonely highway works nicely) avoiding any hard stops if possible.
Perform some light braking to get some heat into the pads.
Perform 3-4 medium braking sessions (60-70 down to20 kph) to get more heat into the pads.
Perform 5-6 hard braking sessions (100 kph down to 20 kph) to get a lot of heat into the pads. Do not lock the tires. If possible, keep the driver’s side window down so you smell the brakes. You’re basically trying to bring them to failure. Once you notice your brakes show a reduced ability to slow the car, they’re done. They should smell awful and ideally be smoking. Drive the car slowly to cool them down or park the car and leave it or 30 minutes or longer.
The purpose of this exercise is to transfer a thin layer of pad material to the rotors. The majority of braking force does not come from a pad to metal interface but a pad to pad interface. If you don’t bed your brakes in properly, they won’t work as well as they could.
With the pads bedded in, you should be done. Yay!
Parking brake adjustment:
Test your parking brake to see where it engages. If it engages near the top of the lever movement, you need to adjust it. This isn’t a difficult procedure but it is annoying and takes time.
In this picture, you can see that Subaru uses a separate drum brake system for the parking brake. This is good as it means if you’ve driven the car very aggressively, you can actually park it with the parking on and not have to worry about ruining the rear brake pads.
To adjust the parking brake engagement, you need to adjust how far out the drum shoes are without the lever up.
I wasn’t able to get any good pictures of this as most of my time was spent under the car with very little room to work spouting expletives.
I would recommend jacking up both ends of the car if you're going to adjust the parking brake. The reason for this is that you don't want the car to be in gear and you obviously don't want the parking brake to be on. You may be fine simply blocking the front tires but I felt more comfortable with the entire car in the air not able to move anywhere.
The adjustment wheel for the rear drum is found underneath a rubber plug on the back (inboard side) of the rear backing plate. You can remove the plug using a screwdriver. You can just barely see the hole with the plug removed in this picture. It is at the top edge of the shadow, to the left of the HL lettering.
To adjust the parking brake, you turn a small star wheel in that hole. To tighten the parking brake, push the wheel up (so that the top of the wheel turns towards the outside of the car). This is a pain in the butt. Use a small screwdriver. Tighten the star wheel enough that you cannot turn the wheel with the parking brake off. Now for the hard part, loosen the star wheel 5-6 notches. I found it far easier to do this with the wheel off. A bent screwdriver would make it easier as well. This is done by pushing the star wheel in the opposite direction from tightening (the top of the wheel turns towards the inside of the car). Periodically put the wheel back on (you don’t need to put the lugs on as well) and see if you can turn it. I also double checked that I did it right by putting the parking brake on by a few clicks to see if it stopped the wheel from turning.
The Carbotech pads and Racing Brake rotors were purchased from Oakos Automotive
http://www.oakos.com/. The DBA rotors were purchased from Tirerack
http://www.tirerack.com/.
Squealing brakes:
If your brakes are squealing, make sure you have the OEM or a suitable replacement backing plate in place.
