Noticed something scary today

[General Stalin]

Any of you guys with rear discs notice the back plate rots-the-hell-out? I was just polishing up my wheels here a couple hours ago and when I was cleaning the dust out from inside the rim I noticed a a sharp stick or something hanging from behind the break rotor. I grabbed it to pull it out and realized it was a piece of rusted metal. Felt my hand back behind the rotor and, much to my dismay, realized that pretty much the entire back plate of the brake rotor was totally rotten. I'm talking I could have pulled the entire plate apart with my bare hands no problem. The other side was like that too.

WTF!

I'm pretty sure that is replaceable, I don't think it's physically part of the axle, but still that sucks. If any of your driving a NBS Denali or Escalade and haven't looked at this you may want to. I live in MA so we pretty much have the worse environmental conditions for cars. Lots of salt on the roads from wet snowy winters and just a lot of moisture in the air.

 

[rigo_jones]

mine is the same. u can buy these.

 

[General Stalin]

Sweet, do they have to be GM parts or is there an aftermarket one? An after market one may not rot out, plus it will probably be cheaper...

 

[blue70chevelle]

my backing plate is rotted out too, and its rotted in such a way that the metal shards touch the brake rotor and make an awful noise. The problem is, is that I think you have to pull the axle to replace the backing plate, and I am in no mood to be pulling axles.. Anyone got any advice?

 

[General Stalin]

I was poking around online earlier, are we sure it's not the dust cover?

 

[blue70chevelle]

i don't know about everyone else, but mines definitely the backing plate. The POS is bolted to the axle housing flange..

 

[General Stalin]

I haven't had a chance to actually get my truck off the ground, pull the wheel and rotor off, and get a good look at it so I don't know the whole deal just yet, but just by feeling around it feels terrible. I'm thinking it is definitely the plate. ******.

 

[My01yuk]

Thought I was the only one with this problem. My yuk had been in New Jersey up until last year when a family member moved back to Texas and I bought it from him. I noticed this problem a couple of months back, just didn't know what it was called or how serious it was. Also noticed my brake lines are really rusted pretty bad too.

---------- Post added at 12:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:41 AM ----------

Scratch that, after doing some searching it's the brake dust shield that has rusted out on mine and not the back plate.

 

[General Stalin]

Yeah, I think I've discovered the same thing. Pretty sure it's just the dust shields on mine as well, as I expected earlier. It's not bad, you can get aftermarket dust covers from Dorman at autozone for short money, and they are probablt better quality haha.

 

[Xowner]

the only bad thing is you gotta pull the axle out of the rearend to replace

 

[blue70chevelle]

I should be tackling this project this weekend, weather permitting. I picked up both plates for 11.57 each from rock auto. They also had 2 piece plates, that if you cut the old ones off, maybe you don't have to pull the axle to install the new ones? I didn't go with them though.. I'll find out how bad it is this weekend. Sucks though, I just loaded the rear with royal purple not to long ago, and now I'm gonna have to drain it again

 

[General Stalin]

Wow, that's rough. Pull the axle out just to bolt on some stupid dust covor. This might be something that I'll do later in the year when I hit 100,000 miles. I will be doing a bunch of maintenance then and will be draining the rear end anyway.

blue70 let me know how it goes man!

 

[My01yuk]

Just curious, what's the harm if I do nothing until next year maybe?

 

[blue70chevelle]

Harm? It depends how badly rotted out the plate is. Right now my plate is rotted in such a way that Metal Shards are rubbing my new rotors and making score marks on them, not to mention the scraping noise. And since the plate has no structural integrity left in it, it is bent/warped in such a way that it is putting pressure on the rotor and causing uneven brake wear. I'll see if I can snap some pictures tomorrow when it's all apart, but my dad's helping me out, and he doesn't exactly have the patience to wait for me to take pictures, so I'll see what I can do

 

[General Stalin]

Yeah, I had a shard of rust from the cover scraping against the inside of my rim. Looking forward to your results blue70

 

[blue70chevelle]

Just got home. Took about 3 hours to do using a lift. You can definitely do this at home with a big floor jack and some tall stands, but you're going to have to have the patience of a saint to do it. The process was fairly straightforward with not many tools being needed. I took pictures of the whole process, as surprisingly my dad took the time to let me take the pics along the way. I'm gonna be posting a how to on this hopefully later today when I get some more time. For now, Tools needed to tackle this job are gonna be;
5/16 wrench
13mm wrench
14mm wrench
18mm wrench
flat head screwdriver
magnet on a stick (for axle c clips)
needle-nose
and preferably needle-nose vise grips

And that's all assuming you're using basic hand tools. Impact guns, Air ratchets and even basic swivel sockets definitely help, but you can do the job without them..

More later

 

[blue70chevelle]

write up is in!
http://www.tahoeyukonforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11745

 

[Xowner]

Man you did i nice job on the write up!!!!

 

[General Stalin]

Man, awesome friggin' job! Look like kind of a pain in the ass, but I'm thinking that will be a job for this summer maybe. We will see. Thanks a lot!

 

[blue70chevelle]

Thanks for the kind words