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My 2003 Aero just passed 194k miles and was on it's original rear rotors and pads. Not heeding my usual advice to leave well enough alone, I decided to replace them. I got the Advance Auto Parts "Wearever Gold" rotors ($67 for the pair after discounts) and Wagner Thermoquiet ceramic pads ($34 from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000CLN05E/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B000CLN05E&linkCode=as2&tag=thesaabnetwork, there was also a rebate for maybe $10 which I filed for but haven't received yet). FWIW Advance has really great discounts for online orders, ridiculous stuff like 40% off orders of $100 or more, free shipping, etc.
Anyway the story on this job was that it just wasn't that difficult. I was a bit afraid that after nearly 11 years I'd have trouble removing various parts but all of them came off without much trouble. The most troublesome part of the job was removing the caliper mounting slide pin/screws on the passenger side, not really enough room to fit the 3/8" wrench with torx socket due to the suspension spring. I say not really enough room because I was able to squeeze it in there, the rubberish coating on the spring got scraped up somewhat.
I spent ~15 minutes reading the Haynes manual and examining the parking brake, but in the end did not bother fooling with it. The Haynes manual discusses backing it off when removing the rotors, then resetting after placing the new rotor on. It was not obvious how to do this so just released it from inside the car to remove the rotors.
2.5 hours from walking out to the garage to finishing my cleanup and test drive. So far so good.
The Wearever rotors seem fine. They were the right size, have the hole for the torx screw, the inspection hole, and are ventilated. No sexy coating on the hub area like the Raybestos AT I used on our Accord, or the Wearever's I used on my brother's Saturn Vue, but neither did the fancy ATE front rotors I put on the Aero a few years ago so I don't make much of that.
Thermoquiet pads have the interesting quality of very specifically advising not to use any sort of anti-squeal or lubricant on the back side of the pads. They claim the backing was designed to be no-squeal without any extra stuff on it. My short test drive was squeal-free so we'll see how they do in the long run.
jeff
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