This is the video the Peugeot dealership sent to the owner of this 308, and this is the invoice to replace just the front brake pads and discs. £432 for two discs and four pads. That is absolutely insane! You can buy the same quality parts for well under half of that, and even if you didn’t have any tools at all, still do it yourself for less money that they want to charge. Seriously!
Now in this specific car’s case, you might also want to buy some replacement wheel bolts to replace the single worst design of locking wheel nuts ever, and an extractor set, but I’ll get onto that in a second. First, you’ll need to use a breaker bar or impact wrench to loosen the wheel bolts, then jack up the car and remove the bolts and the wheel. You can then remove the two T30 screws holding the disc in place – it’s best to use an impact if you have one as these really, really like to strip themselves. With the screws out, you can then grab a 10mm 12 point spanner to remove the e torx bolts that hold the caliper on. The reason I don’t recommend an e torx socket here is at least for the top bolt, Peugeot in their infinite wisdom aligned the brake hose so you physically can’t get a socket on there. The spanner and a mallet works fine. With those out, you can pull on the caliper forwards to push the piston back a little so the caliper will lift off easily. Use a bungee cord to hang the caliper from the spring – don’t just let it dangle on the brake hose!
With the caliper out the way, use an 18mm socket and either a breaker bar or an impact wrench to remove the two caliper bracket bolts. The bracket should then lift up and off of the disc with the pads still attached to it. You can then take the disc off of the hub – we had to use a rubber mallet to free it from the hub as it was a little stuck on.
Next, get your new discs – for this non-GTI model it used the 283mm discs – and use brake cleaner to spray down the disc. It comes with a thin layer of oil to stop them from rusting in storage, but that oil can ruin your new pads and make the brakes next to useless so definitely clean them off. If you want to be extra helpful to the next person replacing the discs, you can apply a light coating of copper anti-seize to the central ring-land. Don’t get any in the bolt holes though! Then you can place the disc on and hand tighten the two T30 screws back in. These really don’t need to be that tight.
Pull the old pads off the caliper bracket, then attach the frankly annoying little spring clips to the ears of the pads. Use a wire brush to thoroughly clean the bracket side clips – these are where your brake pads slide forward and backwards so making sure this area is clean and smooth is important for a good brake feel. You can then attach the caliper bracket back to the hub with it’s two bolts, and I believe these are meant to be torqued to something like 35nm then add 45°, although guten-tight at around 120nm should be fine too.
If you want to, you can add a dab of copper anti-seize to the spring clips so they slide freely, then push them into the caliper. I had to use some channel locks to squeeze them a little as they wouldn’t go into the bracket otherwise. Once both pads are in though, the last thing you need to do before putting the caliper back on is compress the piston backwards. There are proper tools for this, but I just used my channel locks and it worked perfectly. You can then place the caliper back down and install the e torx bolts. These should be tightened to 30nm.
You can then put the wheel back on and tighten the bolts to 100nm. Personally, the second you get the stock locking wheel nut out of the wheel, throw it in the bin. This is why. The locking portion of the bolt is turned by four tiny dowels in the key, and what’s worse is the whole locking portion is only pressed onto the actual bolt using miniscule splines. That means when you go to apply torque to it, it just shears the tiny splines and the head comes off.
This is where the bolt extractors come in handy. You will need to find the right replacement – Peugeot use a style of bolt that’s wildly different to what you’ll find on most other cars – so it might be a bit harder to find the right ones. Euro car parts does sell the right style though, which is where we bought four replacements. To get the old bolt out, I used a 12mm extractor socket and my breaker bar to spin it free. We did get most of the torque in, but the way the bolt failed made it pretty easy to remove with the extractor socket.
Lastly, I want to show you why we were doing the job in the first place – I mean the pads nor discs were fully worn down. The car could have easily gone several thousand more miles on these pads – if it weren’t for this. On the passenger side, for some reason, the inboard disc has a massive ridge in it – and of course a complimentary groove in the pad. The disc has pretty excessive wear on the inboard side, and with more wear might have shattered. We aren’t sure what could have caused this – at first we thought it was a groove from something getting stuck between the disc and pad, but the fact this is embossed on the disc and indented into the disc is confusing. If you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them in the comments below.
