Always grease sliding caliper pins

An often overlooked aspect of home servicing of bikes are the small details. I was helping a friend out by changing her brake pads and looking at why her brakes were a bit wooden? Well, the issue was that the caliper on this bike (a BMW F650GS) is a sliding caliper, and the boot had perished. That let the grease out of the caliper which stopped it sliding. In fact, it completely seized the whole caliper.

This is actually a big problem, cause BMW only want to sell you a new caliper rather than selling you the pin. With a lot of heat and effort I was able to get it apart (pictured above) and then carefully pull it out of the caliper housing to clean it up with a wire wheel then a bunch of emery paper.

After that, it was just a case of greasing the pin correctly. When you do these, you need to use the proper grease. You can’t even get away with super high temperature ‘rubber’ or ‘wheel bearing’ red grease. The only option is silicone caliper grease. Supercheap here in Australia sell little packets of Bendix grease for about $2 a packet (they keep it in with the spark plugs so people don’t flog it). Get that, and you’re set. I bought a tube of it in bulk because I do enough, but the little packets are enough to do a car front end with sliding calipers so they’re more than sufficient for motorcyclists.