Riding motorcycles for the better part of my life, it's a habit for me to triple tap the brakes when using engine braking for this exact reason. And I find myself doing this in cars when there's traffic behind me and I feel like they may not be paying attention. Read: phone addicted drivers.

 

Your pet peeve is my pet peeve. Especially at night sitting behind blinding LED brake lights. Our Highway Code says not to use lights in a way that dazzles other drivers - these morons think it only applies at the front of the car. Same with rear fog lights in rain or light mist.

 

What is the reason to put the car in "maintenance mode" before performing the work. What does it actually do. It's the first time I've heard about it.

 

It retracts the rear caliper pistons. Otherwise you can't compress the caliper pistons to install new pads.

 

It’s “brake maintenance mode”. It allows the brake pistons to be decompressed with less effort.

 

Actually I don't think you can compress the rear caliper pistons all if the car isn't put in brake maintenance mode.

 

Much appreciated guys. Thanks

 

Well done conbrash...could have done with your video about a month earlier! You make the anti rattle clip look so easy, bet that took some re-shoots ;-)
I drained all the DOT 4 fluid from my ssytem and filled with 5.1 whilst I had all the wheels off.

I concur with what you say, estimate 50% less dust, however the pads have not bedded in quite yet so there's not 100% contact with the brake disk. Dust is graphite in colour as opposed to black from OEM pads, ad as such looks a lot less as well.

 

The anti-rattle clip was tame for the filming portion, the other side however came flying off lol.

The different color of the brake pad material is honestly a really good point, I didn't even think about that.

 

Maybe, maybe not.
When I replaced the stock 326 mm rear brakes with 376 mm nearly three years ago now I tried a little experiment on one of the old calipers once I had them out, and the piston manually compressed. But only by a mm or so, it barely moved. That could have been for any one or more of three reasons:
1. You are correct and the only way to compress the rear brake pistons is to have the car do it for you by invoking maintenance mode.
2. It only had that far to go anyway before it reached full compression as the discs and pads were hardly worn at all.
3. The mm or so it moved was just natural built in slack.
I have a sneaking suspicion that a fully extended rear brake piston can be manually compressed (eg by the old fashioned method of using a G-clamp).
They definitely do not turn/screw back in like they do on other Jags such as the XF, I tried it but no go.