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Tech Article

Audi C5 A6 Quattro 4.2 V8 Torque Settings for Front Brakes

Last Updated: 09/24/2017

Parts Group: Caliper

This article discusses the front hub on a 2000 Audi A6 Quattro with the 4.2 V8. On my particular car, the rotor has ten holes in the hub area. The car takes two brake pads on either side, and it has dual-piston calipers. My focus here is on how aggressively to torque the bolts involved in a front brake job.

If you're not here for the technical analysis but would rather buy a used unit from us ... then please select the link below.

Some of these parts seem affordable as rebuilds but the core charge can be $100 per caliper or more, so if your own caliper isn't available to use as a core, you could end up money ahead if you buy a not-that-great-yet-rebuildable part from us for less than our normal price. Then, you do NOT install it in your car, and you send it to a rebuilder as a core.

The information herein is based on my 2000 car, and a brake job I did personally. On my car, the caliper area was a sort of rectangle that, with the pistons retracted and the brake pads removed, could freely float back and forth on the caliper guide pins. I split the inboard and outboard halves of the rectangle by removing the two triple-square bolts that hold the two halves of the caliper (inboard and outboard) together -- and yes, for the top one, the bleed screw is indeed in the way.

How tightly was I supposed to torque these when putting everything back together? I didn't have any official Audi literature handy, so I poked around on the Web and found the value of 25 foot-pounds to be the most credible opinion, so that's what I used.

On my particular car, the brake rotor also needed replacing, and this meant separating the caliper base from the front hub, using two massive 18mm bolts. (Incidentally, a few months after writing this article, I worked on the hubs for a 2001 car, and the bolt heads are 21mm even though the bolts otherwise seem identical).

I couldn't get them loose, initially. The wheel well was too tight for my breaker bar to fit at the desirable angle ... but then it occurred to me that the front wheels can pivot, so after turning the steering wheel such that the rearmost section of the hub was angled outward, I could reach just fine.

How tightly was I supposed to torque these two 18mm bolts when putting everything back together? I found the value of 148 foot-pounds to be the most credible opinion, so that's what I used. Wow, that's a high number. I was worried that my torque wrench might not even go that high, or that the socket would crack or slip ... but everything worked out just fine.