2003 Jeep Grand Cherokee Front Ceramic Brake Pad & Rotor Kit TRQ BKA11187

Brought to you buy 1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet. Hi. I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly. That's going to save you time and money. Thank you, and enjoy the video.

In this video, we're going to do a front brake job on this 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee. Turns out, this car does have good brakes on it. We were actually repairing the hub, but we decided to take apart and put back together the brakes anyways and film it so we can share it with you.

Tools you'll need are a jack and jack stands, 3/4 socket and a breaker bar or a pipe for leverage, also your tire iron to get the lug nuts off, 11/16 socket with a short extension, a hammer, or we resort to a sledgehammer, large flat screwdriver or small pry bar, large C-Clamp, pliers. A wire brush and grease is optional if you have a stuck slide like we did.

You start with a 3/4 inch socket or your tire iron. I'm using impact tools. If you don't have impact tools, you're going to want to start with the tire on the ground. Loosen the lug nuts first, and then take the tire off. Okay, and we'll speed it up as I remove the lug nuts and then remove the tire and wheel. Next, we're going to want to remove the brake caliper. Two bolts, one here and one down here.

Okay, first you might want to take either a large screwdriver or a small pry bar and work it into this hole and pry it out on the calipers. This helps to reset the pistons some, and it just helps to loosen them up as well. And now these two bolts are 11/16, and they should come out pretty easy. Once you remove those bolts, you can pull the caliper with the help of your screwdriver or pry bar. Pull the caliper off, and then you want to carefully put it over on the side here.

Now your brake pads come off pretty easily, and you can see this brake pad. There's a line right in the middle. That's actually your wear indicator, and you can see that there's quite a bit of wear left on these pads. We're not going to replace them. I'm just going to take them apart and put them back together so I can show you. Okay and then I'll do the back one same thing. Just pry it right out. Okay, then as far as your discs go, what you want to do is, it looks like they might be getting a little bit thin, but since I'm not replacing anything, I'm not too worried about them. But what you can do is take the back of your fingernail, and just run it along the disc, and if you feel any deep ridges or anything, that's an indicator you might want to replace them.

Okay, to remove your rotor, you're going to want to remove this caliper bracket, which is two more bolts here and here. These bolts are 3/4 inch, and if you don't have an impact wrench, you're going to want the breaker bar or a piece of a pipe to give you extra leverage on your bracket. Let's do the first one with my impact wrench here.

For this top bolt, I pulled the ABS harness. It's in a little clip. I just pulled it back and out of the way. You can use a 3/4 socket and a small extension. Put those on the bolt. Put my ratchet together, and what you probably want to do is invest that piece of pipe like this, slip the pipe on the ratchet, and hold the ratchet on the bolt. The pipe gives you extra leverage. Pull it nice and easy, and it makes it easy to get big, tough bolts like that out.

Okay, I'm going to coat this liberally with some penetrating oil. I try using a smaller hammer and a piece of wood. Now a larger hammer. Okay, when all else fails, you can always get out the five pound sledge. I've put three lug nuts on so that if I do break the rotor loose, it doesn't go flying, and the hope is that you can just give this one a really good whack and it'll come off. Or it'll loosen up, and that way you won't ruin this rotor if it's good. And that's what we did.

Okay, so unscrew those lug nuts, pull the rotor off, check the back, and make sure there's no permanent damage. Okay, obviously reassembling the brakes. And if you notice, we have a nice new hub on here, so if you want to see how to do that, just check out our other videos for the Grand Cherokee hub. Just put our rotor back on. I always like to take a lug nut and stick it on there just to hold everything in place.

Now if you're putting new shoes on, you need to push your pistons back into your caliper, and with the dual pistons like that, what you want to do is put your old brake shoe in there, okay, then use a nice big C-clamp like this. So let's get in there, and then your brake shoe pushes against both pistons at the same time. Make sure you don't get your C-Clamp on any of the lines or anything. And then as you tighten your C-Clamp, the pistons are forced back into the caliper.

And if your boot should fold up, you just push it right back in. Now you can put your caliper bracket back on. You want to make sure these are nice and free. Okay they should move back and forth. We got kind of a stuck one here. All right. This one moves nice and free. This one's stuck, so what we're going to do is attempt to pull it out. Now we'll use a pair of pliers to turn and pull it out.

Okay, then we're going to wire brush that up real good and put some grease on it so it'll move better. Okay, so here's our slide bolt nicely cleaned up, so we'll stick a bunch of wheel bearing grease on there. A new reconditioned bolt here. Right in. Got to get that boot back on. Oh that moves a whole lot better. Now we'll screw it in. Start those two bolts in. Now I'm going to tighten these caliper bracket bolts to 85 foot-pounds. And now my pads can go back in, and for anybody wondering why I'm installing old brakes, it's because we really did this video.

The rear we were doing was this hub. The brakes on this vehicle are fine, so we are just reinstalling the old ones. I thought we could do a video and show you how to do it at the same time. So you just put the pads in, push the pads in, and now your caliper comes down. Actually one thing, your ABS harness, make sure you clip it back in to the bracket. You hook it up to access that back bracket bolt. Put your caliper right back down on. You might have to push these slides in a little bit. Now your caliper bolts. You work the caliper out until you get the bolts. Start them. You just need to make sure that these slides are also twisted the right way.

These caliper bolts you only want to tighten to about 20 foot-pounds, and you might say, "Well that's not a lot." And that's right, it's not a lot. These bolts just kind of hold things in place. What really takes the pressure is this big bracket with those bolts that you tightened up to 85 foot-pounds. Okay, now we can remove that lug nut that we put into place, and it's time to put the wheel back on.

Now you can put your wheel back on, and then start your lug nuts by hand so you avoid cross threading them. And now I'm just using the impact wrench to preliminarily tighten them, and then I'll put it on the ground and torque them. Okay, now I'm going to use my torque wrench, and I'm going to torque these lug nuts to 100 foot pounds, and I'm going to kind of use a star pattern crossing over each one. And this is not the last step, so stay tuned. Okay, whenever you do brake work, make sure that you pump the brakes a bunch of times and then do a test stop from about five miles an hour and ten miles an hour. Before you road test the vehicle, make sure the brakes are working properly.

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