poor braking

[mxz-man]

Anyone elses esteem have crap breaks, the brakes are fine but this thing is just scary when you need to stop quickly. Almost rear ended somone the other day, and i was at a good following distance, or so I thought.

[Oxide_Zer0]

have u tried bleeding the brakes??

[jim_naisium]

Make sure you do this when no one else is around and you are not in danger of damaging anything (like out in the middle of a big empty parking lot)...

When you are braking hard trying pulling up on the parking brake at the same time, if you can feel the car trying to stop harder while doing this your rear brakes need to be adjusted.

Something that greatly helped with my FRONT brakes was switching from organic brake pads to ceramic brake pads, I really noticed the difference, if you don't know the difference organic brake pads kind of feel like a weird plastic, ceramic brake pads, well, fell like ceramic.

[nufrosty]

I just recently found during a routine front brake replacement on my 99 Esteem, that one of the front brake calipers had a frozen/seized caliper slider pin.

This was affecting the braking by a huge amount, essentially causing all of the front braking force to be applied to one side only (the right side in my case).

I could only slightly tell that the car wanted to pull to one side when braking hard. The biggest symptom was the overall stopping distance.

Might be something else to check by hitting the brakes hard and seeing if you feel a pull to one side. If you do, check the opposite side for free-sliding pins.

[jim_naisium]

Nufrosty is correct on this, over time the factory white lithium grease dries up (it did on mine) and the pins can get stuck in place, these should be greased on a regular basis when you do work on the brakes is the best time for it.