I have dreaded changing the brakes on my truck for the past few months. Over the weekend I thought I heard a little bit of grinding when coming to a stop. That meant I have to at least pull the wheels off and inspect the brakes.

On the way home from the gym today, I decided there was no more putting it off. I worked for a couple of hours and then went out to change the brakes. I pulled off the first tire, and read the instructions. It took me 5 minutes to realize that I was looking at the instructions for the 2 wheel drive setup…which looks nothing like my caliper setup for the 4 wheel drive Tacoma. Once that was taken care of, I followed the instructions in the service manual and had the pads changed in under 20 minutes. For those of you who know how I am about working on vehicles, this is not an exaggeration…I was actually able to do something in under 4 hours (Yes…the first time I changed the oil on that truck it took nearly 4 hours because I couldn’t figure out how to get to the oil filter without burning myself on the exhaust). Overall, the whole experience took about an hour and was very painless. It’s a good thing I changed them now because Toyota publishes a recommendation for a minimum of 1mm of pad thickness and one of the pads was pushing that limit.