Review on 🔧 Lang Tools 279-5420 279 Brake Caliper Press: The Ultimate Solution for Efficient Brake Caliper Maintenance by Byron Lucas

I bought this because of the many rave reviews with 5 stars. Conceptually, you twist the handle in one direction and the pads ratchet apart. Flip the switch and flip the handle the other way to connect the pads. The tool is a quality piece of thick metal. The main issue not allowing a 5 star rating is that force must be applied to both spacers for the ratchet to engage. For example, if you put a tool into a caliper with the piston partially retracted, you might think that the ratchet is expanding the plates, allowing you to apply force to the piston. In practice, if the tooling plates are still a short distance from the caliper and piston, you will need to manually squeeze the plates a little to engage the ratchet. This can be a problem if you're already holding the caliper with one hand. The workaround is to lengthen the plates so that they are roughly the distance between the caliper and the piston, so automatically there is a force that compresses the tooling plates and the ratchet works fine. There are several other reviews that point to this issue. One of them says that this tool is good "if the teeth stick"; Another says the ratchet "requires resistance on both plates to move in and out". These observations are absolutely correct and present a problem that limits the effectiveness of this tool. It's still better than a C-clamp and old pads or pushing in the pistons by hand. But with the current ratchet design issue, this is not an absolute 5 star tool.