"The bolts are an allen."

"Sorry to say, if you don't know what your doing then take it to a shop. Your talking about your breaks and your life and posibly others."

Shocker,

When the You-Tube video guy working on a 2002 Durango gives you a list of tools that includes a T47 torx and shows you the torx up close, tells you the replacement procedure applies to Durangos from 98 to 03 and then takes the caliper off with the T47 torx, you're naturally inclinced to think that's the tool you need.

Meanwhile, this forum and others like it are about amatuers sorting stuff out and there are lots of inconsistent things floating around between You Tube, Dodgeforum, and sites like it. If you think that means I should take my ride to a dealer, think again. i suggest you read the whole thread before you go off about knowing what to do and risking one's life.

 

srch,

Thanks for the picture. I compared it to my caliper and caliper bracket and they are not the same. I mean my caliper/bracket assembly is not the same as the caliper/bracket assembly that I see in your picture. What seems to be keeping me from lifting my caliper out of the bracket is the fact that a long spring-like piece (that corresponds roughly to the gray piece on the face of your caliper) extends on both sides to long tongs that bear on the right and left back sides of the bracket. I think the caliper would come off easily if that piece was somehow removed. I pried where you told me to pry, but everything kept snapping back into place (because the spring/tongs were bearing on the backside of the bracket) when I stopped prying with the screwdriver.

Given the variance in caliper bolt heads, I wonder about variance in other parts as well.

Any ideas? It looks like that spring should be removed, but I would rather not play a hunch.

 

Dubina, I think I have the same calipers you're describing. You can pop that bracket off with a flathead screwdriver. Just be careful because it may actually "pop" out (just don't lean your face in too close). After you remove it, the caliper should come out pretty easily. If not you can pry from beneath like the other poster suggested. If you're still having a tough time you can open the bleeder valve a little to reduce the pressure then try to push the piston in with a c-clamp or screwdriver (careful not to damage the rotor, unless you're replacing it anyway)

 

how about giving us a picture of what you are looking at? you know what they say, a picture is worth 1000 words . . .

and the factory bolts for the brakes on every single durango and dakota i have ever worked on are allen heads, so whoever had the torx someone must have swapped it in bc they stripped out the origional bolt

 

Well I dont know if the torx are standard or not, but I have em on my front brakes and I much prefer them to Allen heads. I also have twin piston calipers on the front but I have heard no one else mention these, and there is no reference to them in the Haynes manual, but I seen um with my own two eyes.

 

the 03 had an option for the larger brake package, you lucked out and got it, my dads old 03 dakota had them too, but they still used allen heads for the bolts, which IMO is better bc not only are they easier to find, but they are harder to strip out the head(as long as you use the correct size)

 

Yea I lucked out, the build sheet for this shows all the HD options, and it looks to have been well maintained for most of its life, but stuff wears out and I am trying to catch up with it part by part, just had a reman fr diff fitted, then did the fr hubs myself, this weekend its a new rad, which has just arrived this morning, bin waiting almost 2 weeks, and new fr rotors, then I need shocks, and on and on lol. But I do love it and intend to keep, so its worth the dollars.

 

a picture of your caliper would be helpful as said... the picture i posted isn't my caliper but it served to show the points that i was using to get the caliper off... my caliper when the pads are on it only have one long arm spring thing on it and that is on the top...

hope to see a picture... could greatly aid in the help with your problem

:-)

 

"...how about giving us a picture of what you are looking at? you know what they say, a picture is worth 1000 words...."

I'm trying. Took a picture last night and downloaded it overnight to my PC. Just tried to attach it (the jpg) to this post. But it's a 3.2 meg file and it looks like dodgeforum wants jpg attachments that are much smaller.

I might be able to attach the picture if I could make the file size smaller, but I don't know how to do that. Not sure I could zip a 3.2 meg file. I tried to take a sceenshot of the jpg image and reduce it and that worked so far as I got the size down to 2 meg, but that's still way too much.

Moreover, I see pictures here that look like they must be way way more than 19.5 k. So there must be a trick to posting pictures here and I don't know that trick (either).

PS: I got the file size down to 380 K by saving the jpg as a gif, but that's still too big.

 

upload it to a photo website and post a link