It’s time to replace the front brakes on my 2008 TSX. At 140k I am also taking preventative measures by replacing the brake hoses and rebuilding the calipers. One of the caliper pistons was a little rusty so I figured it would be easier to order a rebuilt set. The general advice is to replace both at the same time so I ordered a left and right Ultra Premium Caliper from Cardone. Since they are ordered individually (from the same site) not as a pair, the ones they sent are clearly two different castings.
The one with the part number clearly stamped on the main body of the caliper matches what is in the car and looks fine. The other is the left side caliper (left side of pic) which looks like an older casting, close, but not the same, and kind of defeats the purpose of replacing them as a pair to keep things even. I am sure they are almost the same, but why order ultra premium calipers when what they send is the run of the mill rebuilds (with different sliding pins, again probably interchangeable)?
I think the bigger issue is that the one with the wonky older style casting was never fully finished. I think the core calipers come in and are bead or sand blasted. On one caliper, the last finishing step of machining the banjo bolt sealing surface was not done so it is raw cast iron after sand blasting.
The other side they sent was correctly finished
Waiting to hear back from the website and manufacturer to see if they can swap out the wonky caliper for one that matches. I should mention that these seem to be one of the better rebuilt calipers for this application and they are super cheap ($36 a side, I have to cover mailing back the core) compared to the odd brand rebuilts from local parts stores.
I am putting on a replacement set of EBC BSD Rotors as they seem to have better metallurgy and held up for quite a long time versus the stock ones which repeatedly warped. I rebuilt this side already but will replace it with the Cardone one since they have a decent grey paint finish (although not an issue to me, one of them it is flaking off here and there). I always use a hand wire brush to clean hub surface (under the rotor) and apply a light surface coating of anti-seize to the hub and the outer rotor hat to prevent corrosion which could cause causing axial skewing.