Remove Brake Pads on Mountain Bikes

Video Transcript

"These aren't pliers, but they'll do. There's one pad. This one's a little bit tougher to get out. I'll spin this around. You can see there's actually a spring in here that's a little bit bigger than the spring that you have on your Hayes brakes, which is a whole problem unto itself because it also is absolutely crucial to the proper function of the brakes. I'm going to pull this out with these pliers because it's not coming out another way. So you can see these pads are also definitely handed. These are fairly new pads. You can tell because they still have a lot of life to them. Brake pads don't have a wear line like you'd see on a car tire or something like that, but when they get down to a certain thickness, which is specified by the manufacturer, it's a good idea to replace them. If you know you're going to be riding in really muddy, horrible conditions, and your brake pads aren't fully cooked, but they're close to it, you want to preemptively replace them. So here on our Avid pad, we've got our spring, which instead of being attached to each individual pad, it sits between them. So it sort of measures up on the outside like so. In our next video, I'm going to show you how to reinstall these pads, quickly and hassle-free, into your brake system."