Good morning Savage friends. It has been a fun 9 months with this bike, I've put about 6k miles on it as a daily driver. Over the last couple of weeks I have noticed my rear brake is fading. It will occasionally stop like normal when it is damp from morning dew, but that quickly fades. I was previously able to lock up the rear tire if I really put force into the rear brake pedal, now I can give it a lot of pressure and get nearly 0 stopping force. My front brakes are working well, but I will likely replace the pads up there a couple of weeks after I get the rear addressed.

So my questions are; would my brakes really lose that much friction over the course of a week or too? Should I be looking for another issue also? And finally, how big of a pain in the butt is the rear brake to change? Are there any good videos or walk-throughs? I cant seem to find a free link to Clymers, and I am too cheap to buy it (my kid and wife get all of my money).

Assume I am semi-technical and can figure out most things, but also that my focus has always been cars until I owned this Savage.

Any and all advice is appreciated. Hoping to gauge the difficulty, then order parts, and hopefully get this worked out next week.

If it's Not spitting the brake dust out,it can interfere with function. If you got some pollution in there, that could do it. Have you done any work in the area? Is the pedal still where it was? The rear brake on these is good for untold miles. Unless you adjust it to be dragging and getting hot?
A finger on the hub after a few miles where you Don't even use the rear brake will tell you if they are dragging.