Whoa. Let me get my bearings. Woo. Hey, everyone. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, we're working on a 2013 Subaru Outback. We're going to be replacing a front wheel bearing. It's going to be a very simple job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always come on and check us out down at 1aauto.com. Thanks.
All right, friends. So one of the first things that we're going to have to do is we're going to have to make sure that we loosen up all five of these lug nuts. We don't want them very loose. We just want them to be broken free. So we can go ahead and taken them off once we get the vehicle up. The reason for doing it while the vehicle is semi supported on the ground but still most of the weight is off of the tire but still touching is just so when I'm going to loosen this with my 19 millimeter socket and I got to the left, I'm not going to be spinning the wheel in the air. Right? We're just going to get them loose. Like I said, you don't want to take them all the way out. You don't want them super loose because if the wheel can move around, you might damage your aluminum wheel. You might damage your studs that are underneath there. You might basically just cause damage that you don't want to cause. All right? So we're going to do this.
We're going to do that to all the lug nuts that we're going to be taking the wheels off of and we'll move along. So now we're going to raise and support the vehicle. We're using a two post lift. You can use something like a jack and some jack stands. All right. Got the majority of these lug nuts off. I'm holding the wheel so it doesn't fall off. I'm turning my 19 millimeter lug nut to the left. There it is in there. Grab my wheel. Lower it to the ground and I'll put it out of the way. So now we got the wheel off. We're going to go ahead and remove our bleeder screw cover right here. You can use a small pocket screwdriver. I'm just going to try to pull it off. You can use whatever you have access to. There we are, little cover. Set it aside someplace where we won't lose it. Those things are like gold. I'm going to use my 10 millimeter. I'm just using a wrench. You can use a socket if you want. I'm going to go to the left, which is counterclockwise. Just break it free.
Watch for a little trickle of fluid. That lets me know that the bleeder screw is actually open. I'm going to close it right back off. Perfect. So now that we know that that opens up, I can either try pushing the caliper back while it's still on the vehicle or I can use a caliper depression tool. Its a little bit easier with dual piston calipers to just do it while it's on the vehicle. So I'm gonna grab a little bleeder screw hose. I'm going to run it down to a recycling receptacle. I'm going to put it on there. I'll open this back up. I'll use a small pry bar. I'm going to go between the caliper and the rotor. Try to pull the caliper in this direction, which will in turn push these pistons in to the poin that they're bottomed out and then I'll go ahead and move ahead to taking off these caliper mounting bolts. So I've got my hose. This goes down to my recycling receptacle down there. I'm going to put it right on the bleeder screw. I'm going to hold it on.
I'm going to turn my 10 millimeter wrench, once again, counterclockwise to open it up. I'm going to take my small pry bar or if you have access to a screwdriver, whatever you want to use. You're going to go through the slots in your caliper. Try to get it up against the rotor and then we're just going to try to pry away. Right now, the caliper's moving. You can see fluid coming down. Okay. When I'm working up close to my face like this, I'm going to want to be careful not to punch myself in the face. I'm kind of like Tyson. I don't want to knock myself out. I'm that kind of guy, right? Here we go. Just going to get it in there. See what I can do. Essentially what we're trying to do, though, is just push those pistons back as far as they can go. There we go. So the caliper can move around quite a bit. I'm just going to push it in that direction now. I'm going to see about just going directly against the pistons. It's kind of hard to see, I'm sure, from your angle.
I'll show you once I get the caliper off what I actually physically did under there. Just go here. I'm being very careful not to try to poke up against any boots that are in there. You don't want to damage any of your caliper boots. That feels pretty good. Let's give it one second to let any air that I might have pushed up in there just to kind of burp its way out. It's going to come down the tube. I don't need to wait for too long because I'm going to end up bleeding this out in the end anyway. So that seems pretty good. Let's close it off. Get my wrench off of there. I'm going to make sure all my fluid gets down into my hose, nothing gets on the floor or the ground or whatever you're working under. My eyes. I'll set this aside. All right, so I got myself a little caliper hook. I want to make sure that I have this ready and at hand so I can hold my caliper.
I'm just going to hold it up someplace onto maybe my strut basically so my caliper isn't hanging on the hose and putting a tug on my hose. I don't want to put any tears or rips or tugs, anything that might cause a bubble or damage to this. Your brake system's high pressure. If you end up messing up your hose, you see a little crack or anything like that or a bubble, usually you'll see bubbles along where the metal meets on, just replace the hose for safety's sake, okay? To move along, I'm going to remove this bolt right here and this one right here using a 14 millimeter. You can use a wrench or a socket. A wrench is going to be much easier in this area. So I'm going to start with the bottom first. When I take it out, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to leave it in a couple threads though, okay? So I'm going to take it almost all the way out. It's nice and loose now. I'll leave it like that. I'm going to come up here. I'm going to do this one. Here we are. Okay.
I'm going to hold my caliper so it can't go anywhere. Now I can remove my caliper bolt. These bolts right here hold your caliper to the sliders. So some people might call them caliper slider bolts. That's what they look like. They're both the same. You don't have to worry about mixing them up. I'm going to grab my caliper, pull it off. I'll show you what I was doing. Here's your caliper pistons, okay? When you step on your brake, it forces fluid through the brake hose right here and into your caliper. In turn, it goes through these. It pushes fluid out into the pistons, which then in turn squeeze these brake pads up against your rotor, causing friction and causing your vehicle to stop or slow. So I'm just going to go ahead and hang this up here. Actually, let's talk about something real quick. Since we're here and we're looking at it, you want to make sure that there's no moisture coming out from in between that piston and this boot and there's no rips or cracks or anything crazy going on there. This one looks good.
So I'd say we can go ahead and hang this up and out of the way for now. We'll move along. We're going to take off a caliper bracket bolt there, caliper bracket bolt there, okay? We'll get those right out of the way. Once we start them out, we'll leave them in just a little bit and we'll remove the other one completely and then this one, just like we did before, okay? You don't want to remove it all the way and then try to do this one and try to hold everything. It's going to be hard. Just leave it in a little bit. It's going to save you a little bit of hassle. I got my 17 millimeter wrench. Okay? What I'm going to do is I'm just going to give it a little bonk with my rubber mallet just like that. There we are. I could try to use my fist, risk hurting myself. Let's work smarter. You could also use an airgun if you had something like that. A lot of people do. But some people don't.
So for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to go ahead and do it caveman style. I'm going to use my 17 on the top now. Same thing. I got my safety glasses on. There we are. Nice and loose. This one. Nice and loose. Cool. I can put away my wrench. I'm going to grab the bolt that's hardest to get to. I'll take that one out first while I'm holding my caliper bracket. Come on. There it is. I'm still holding my caliper bracket so it can't fall down, hit me in the foot. You'll notice there's a lot of fluid here. This is just penetrant spray. So there's our caliper bracket. Okay, friends, so now we're going to go ahead and take off our brake rotor. This is part of our friction material, right? We've got our pads that squeeze on this. This is the rotor, okay? It's heavy duty metal. Bing, bing, bing. It's going to be super heavy.
What we might have to do, if this doesn't want to break free from the hub that's underneath there, we're going to have to either whack it with a hammer if we're replacing it or if we're not replacing it, we definitely don't want to whack you with a hammer, right? We're just going to use a little bolt right there. You can find the right thread pitch and everything. Screw it in there and that'll press up against the hub that's behind there and screw into the threads in the rotor and push the rotor away from the hub. For this, we're actually just going to be replacing the rotor anyway. So what I like to do is grab one of our lug nuts. It's nothing special. It's just one that came off the vehicle. I'm going to put it on a few threads. [inaudible 00:09:47] couple more than that just in case. I'm going to take a little bit of penetrant, wearing my safety glasses in case anything comes back and tries to shoot me in the face. Worst case scenario, it gets in my beard. It's horrible. But I can live. Okay. I got penetrant in there.
It's all going to soak in for a second. Like I said, we're assuming that we're replacing this rotor, okay? So we're not worried about the condition about it when we're done. So now I'm going to use my big, fabulous hammer. I'm going to give it a couple whacks. This rotor's garbage. So I don't have to worry about trying to make sure that I hit just around here just in case because I don't want to damage this. This rotor is garbage. I'm going to whack as far out as possible for the most amount of leverage as possible, okay? So I'm just going to go right around here. I'm going to try to stay away from these lug studs right here because if I'm swinging and I'm trying to hit right here somehow, I mean, I might be pretty good. But there's pretty good odds that I might nick this things. If I nick this thing, I bend over the threads.
Well, you're probably either going to replace the bearing or you're going to have to go down and you're going to have to get yourself a new lug stud and figure out how to put that in or you might even be lucky enough that you can just chase the threads if it's not too damaged. Let's skip right over that. We're just going to hit right here because we're replacing these rotors. So I'm wearing my safety glasses, wearing my hand safety as well. I'm going to go ahead and whack it just like that, nice and light. I'm going to hold my rotor so it can't fall off and hurt me. Remove this lug nut. Just going to try to work it off. There's going to be some rust and rot behind there as you can tell. Everything's falling out. You're going to have to just keep going back and forth. If for some reason it didn't want to come any further, you're having a super hard time, you're getting kind of irritated, just take your hammer, come from the backside. So there we go. Rotor's off.
As you can tell by the condition of this rotor, it's not the best quality. I know that I just whacked it on this side. But we'll just pretend that that didn't happen. We just to inspect the rotor. It's not very good quality. I would want to replace this with a quality 1A Auto part. Okay, friends, so now what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to take off this axle nut. So I brought the vehicle closer to the ground so I can show you something. Assuming you're not using an airgun or something that's much more efficient, we're just going to do it this way. We have our long handled pry bar, okay? We're going to go in between the studs, just like this. We don't really have to worry about damaging the studs so much because we're replacing this bearing anyway. But assuming we weren't replacing this bearing, we were just trying to maybe do the axle or whatever we might have been doing, we'd want to make sure that the bar isn't sitting at an awkward angle like this. You know what I mean?
We want it to be as flat as it can be just like that and we're going to try to make sure that we can't turn this to the left. It's nice and locked in. We're going to use our 32 millimeter socket with our long handled ratchet in reverse. we're going to turn it to the left, counterclockwise. Let's see. Here we are. Take it right off of there. That's what it looks like. Sometimes, there's a washer in there on some applications. This particular vehicle, you don't have one. So that's okay. But if there is one, you want to make sure that you put it back in. More than likely, since you're watching this video, you're probably working on the same car. So you're not going to have a washer. So don't worry about what I'm talking about. But if you were working on a different vehicle, there may be one. So now, remove this stuff out of the way. We'll bring it back up and we can get to work again. So here we go. You got to this point. Now we're trying to push the axle out of the hub. Man, that thing's stuck.
We're going to have to do something about it. We're going to take a little bit of penetrant, spray it in there. We'll let it sit while we grab the rest of our tools. Other tools that we could use might be something like a punch where you can get right in this little center groove and a hammer, okay, or you can use something like a little air chisel with a center punch. But what we don't want to use is a hammer directly on this because what you could do is peen this over and then you won't be able to get your nut back on, okay? If you don't have access to a punch and a hammer or the air tool, what you could do, last resort, put your nut back on, okay? Get it so it's pretty much flush with what we're dealing with here, the axle, and then go ahead and whack it. Theoretically, you shouldn't cause too much damage to the end of the axle doing this. But that's last resort, really, okay?
At the very last and the don't even do it resort would be to just hit on this axle without having anything there, okay? So forget that part. Oh, penetrant works. Cool. So that went in nice and easy. Perfect. So now we know when we go to do this wheel bearing, we'll be able to push the axle out of the way to be able to get to the bolt heads from the backside. So now we can move along to getting out these bolts that come through the wheel bearing. You got the threads coming through right here, right there, okay? It's the same for the lowers. There's two down there, two up top, just threads coming out. So if you want to hit those with some penetrant, it's always a great idea. If it came down to it, you could try to heat up the wheel bearing right up along here if, for some reason, those bolts don't want to come free. But we'll deal with that if it comes along.
So something I wanted to show you real quick is right here is where your ABS sensor comes through and that's what reads how fast this wheel is going to be spinning. It's a very delicate piece of electronics. It comes through right here, has a little 10 millimeter bolt that holds it in and then this is the wiring. So we want to be very careful. Once we get this wheel bearing out, the axle's going to be able to move around quite a bit. We don't want to bonk that too much, okay? If you feel like it's going to be an issue, you could try to remove this bolt right here, try to remove the hole sensor from the knuckle. Sometimes, what'll happen is you'll get the bolt out. You'll try to move this and you'll end up breaking the sensor. So we're going to try doing it without possibly breaking the sensor. We're going to try to do it the easy way and we'll go that way. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to remove these four bolts.
There's one down here, one over there, one up top and the other one over on the other side up top, okay? So I got my 14 millimeter socket. I just have a little wobble extension. You can use whatever you got, maybe a swivel socket or something. I've got my 3/8 drive ratchet. Just going to see about breaking it free. It feel good. Everything on this is pretty rusted. If you had access to an airgun and you can get in there, you'd probably be much better off. Okay, friends, so let's say you're still trying to get this bearing off, right? You got these bolts. They come through the wheel bearing. But they come through from the other side. To get to those 14 millimeter heads, it's really tough to get to with the axle in the way. You try to push it back. You can get it back a little bit. But you're trying to turn the ratchet that keeps coming forward. It's just giving you a lot of grief. Let's move ahead, right? What we're going to do is we're going to make sure that our ABS wire is nice and loose.
So I'm going to grab these two prongs right here. I'm going to go ahead and do that. That's going to give us plenty of slack. Next, what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove these two bolts right here, there's a bolt that comes through from the rear to the front and then a nut. Same down here. Okay? We'll take note that the top one has a little bit of a washer right here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my 19 millimeter wrench back here, my 19 millimeter socket up there and I'm just going to turn those to the left and I'll take off the nut, take off the nut, take the bolts out. We'll be able to take our knuckle, bring it down. It'll give us more room. When you do something like this, you're going to have to take into consideration that you're probably going to need an alignment afterward. It's always a good idea whenever you're doing front end stuff. Some people will even say when you're doing this wheel bearing anyway you should be doing an alignment. I mean, it's just a general good idea.
Once a year is good habit. Some people don't do it at all. You just keep wearing out your tires. You do you, boo boo. So I'm going to take my wrench. I'm going to take my socket, turn these out. I'm going to get the nuts all the way off and then we'll take the bolts out and we'll bring down this knuckle. 19. 19. Lifting. Turning it to the left. Okay, so before we go ahead and loosen up these nuts on the backside there, we're just going to mark where this is. This is a camber adjustment right here. On the inside of there, it has a little bit of an oblong. So as you turn this. It'll make your knuckle either go in or out. That's how you do the adjustment, okay? So we want to just mark it. If you have crayon or marker or lipstick or whatever you've got, we're just going to put the mark wherever you can remember where it is and where it goes. Going to line those up. It might be better to do a straight line up and down. I was from this angle.
So I'm just going to try to remember that's the angle it goes in, okay? So now that I have that marked, I can go ahead and take off those nuts and we'll move along. All right. I got those two bolts out. Just going to go like that. I'm going to be careful not to pull too car and separate my axle. We don't want to yank on this boot. It's just a joint in there. It just kind of sits in there and it does this. If I go and pop it out, it would be like pulling your kneecap out of its socket. Good luck getting everything back in and feeling good again. So now I got clear view of all these bolts down here. It's going to be a little bit easier to try to get in there. So now we can move ahead hopefully a little easier. That gets on there. So there we go. Get our 14. Continue turning to the left. It should be almost out. All right. That's number four. Boy, these were fighters.
It's a good thing we did what we did and removed this so I can get easy access to getting to them, getting them off with a ratchet the whole way. It might have taken a few days. But yeah, so now we're at the point where we can start pounding off this wheel bearing. Like I said, we need to be careful for the ABS sensor, which is behind there. So when I'm whacking this with a hammer, it's going to be shaking the axle around. The axle could go bump bump on the sensor. So just please try to pay attention to that and basically the way that I'm going to do it is I'm just going to get this knuckle back sitting up in here. I'll just put the bolts through so they're sitting in there nice and good. I'll put a little nut on there on each one so it doesn't fall out and then I can go ahead and whack this with my big, fabulous hammer. Okay, friends, here we go. This is the fun part.
We're going to take our big, fabulous hammer, our safety glasses, hand protection. We're going to whack right here, okay? We're going to be careful not to hit our backing plate. We're going to be careful to stay away from our ABS sensor wire. Everything's nice and out of the way. I'm going to hit right on here essentially. Boom, like that. I'm going to try to break it free right along here. Once it starts coming free, if I felt the need, I could come around to the other side, bang, bang, try to whack it off that way. But first, I'm going to hit right here, okay? By the way, I'm replacing this. So that's why I can do it. If I was just replacing the axle, obviously I don't want to be whacking on this thing, okay? We're doing the bearing. So I'm going to beat the crap out of this thing. Here we go. There we are. It's starting to come free. That's nice. I can move the backing plate around. I can see the crack. Now's the perfect time to spray a little bit of penetrant in there.
It'll work its way in and then we can give it a couple more whacks. Let it work its way in there. Okay. So here we go. It broke free. I'm going to try to pull it off of the axle just like that. I tried not to make sure that I pulled too much before it came out of the axle because here's my ABS sensor like I mentioned to you. So if I pulled this axle, ugh, right? Ah, oh no. Now I'm going to have to buy one of these. It's an easy replacement. But I don't want to have to do it if I don't have to. So now we've got our wheel bearing. We've got our backing plate. We can just either just try to wiggle this off. It might want to come free. It might not. If it doesn't, we can just tap it with a hammer or little pry bar, screwdriver, whatever you got. We'll get it off. We'll compare it to the new one and we'll go on from here. Okay, we have our old wheel bearing. This is a front wheel bearing out of a 2013 Subaru Outback.
As you can tell, it's in practically new condition. Well, maybe now. But anyway, here's our quality part from 1aauto.com. As you could tell, this is in new condition. Everything is very nice on this. The bearing turns perfect. It doesn't spin freely. It doesn't howl. It doesn't have any movement like that. A new bearing, you definitely shouldn't have any movement like this. Okay? An old bearing, I don't know if you can see it with your camera or not, right along this little ... in the crack, that's what you might get, okay? You can spin it. I don't know if we'll hear anything. You can't really hear it. When you're driving it, you can definitely hear a howl. You hear a howling coming from your vehicle, more than likely, it's a wheel bearing. All right, so to get back to it, we've got our four mounting holes, four mounting holes. These two are closer. These two are further. Closer, further, perfect. Turn her over. We've got five lug studs on each one. That's where the wheel sits onto or actually the rotor and then the wheel, right?
As you could tell, the center where the axle goes in is slotted. It looks perfect.
So next step, let's get this puppy cleaned up. This is our knuckle right here. This is where our wheel bearing is going to bolt into. So we need to make sure we have a nice, clean surface for it to mount onto. You're going to see some areas that have crud in there. You want to make sure you get the majority of that stuff off. Also, right along here, this is your axle splines. You can that there's a lot of crud in there and then if we move this axle around, you can tell inside the hub there's a lot of stuff inside there that we need to get out as well. We got stuff just flying out all over the place. I'm wearing my safety glasses, of course. So I want to make sure that I clean all this up the best I can. So I'll just grab a little bit of parts cleaner, grab my little brush. This thing has seen better days. But I use it all the time and a little pocket screwdriver. Pretty basic tools.
We got our bucket down here to collect any material that might go down, fluids, chemicals, whatever can be recycled. We want to go ahead and stand back. I'm going to spray this stuff. Just get everything nice and moist, wet. Get it working. I'm going to take my pocket screwdriver. I'm going to be very careful for my sensor. We keep talking about the sensor. But I'm going to keep emphasizing on it. Please be careful with it. You don't want to buy another one. I'm pretty sure they're a little expensive. So I'm just scraping off all the big chunks here. I want to make sure that I have good contact with that wheel bearing so it can ground out through the knuckle of the vehicle. So I got it scraped down pretty good. I got the majority of the big chunks off. I'm going to take my parts cleaner again. Spray it in there. I'm going to take my handy little brush, just try to clean things up a little bit. I want to make sure there's no big chunks. Things might be a little bit discolored here or there. That's okay. I'm not worried about discoloration.
I'm just worried about raised areas that'll cause the bearing not to sit flush inside the knuckles. It looks pretty good. Just hit these splines real quick. Feels good. I'm going to blast it one more time with my parts cleaner over my bucket. Okay, I'm going to let that dry for a second. It only take a second, really. We're going to use a little bit of copper never seize, okay? I'm going to try to spray along inside here and then on this right here. I don't want to get anything on the threads of the axle right here. We don't need any never seize here. If anything, you can use a little bit of thread locker. But along here in these splines, if you put it on there, it's going to be great for the next time you go to do the wheel bearing, I don't know, 100,000 miles from now or whenever it's needed. So assuming this is dried, which it's pretty darn close now at this point, I don't necessarily need to really focus any spray onto that sensor. It's not going to harm it any if I get a little bit on there.
But I'm not going to sit here and go ... and spray it, okay? So I'm going to get the splines. Just get those real quick. Look good. Try to get inside that hole. There we go. That looks pretty good. If you needed to and you're wearing a glove, you can go ahead and spread it around. Spread the love. Everybody get a little bit. You get some never seize and you get some never seize. There we go, okay? Looks good. If you're not wearing a glove, you don't need to get it all over your hands. It's probably better not to, right? Okay, now we're clear to start getting ready that we're going to clean up the bolts, okay? Then we'll get the bearing in here with the backing plate on there and we'll put the bolts through and mount it up. So we've got our four bolts. I just went ahead and I cleaned up the threads the best I could. They don't have to be too perfect. I'm going to use a little bit of thread locker. Some people say you don't have to worry about it.
Maybe even for the purpose of this video, I shouldn't worry about it. But I personally prefer to use thread locker on something like this. There we are, okay? So now we're going to grab our backing plate. We're going to grab our bearing, get them situated. We're going to take our four bolts, put them through the back of the knuckle. It might be easier if we go ahead and remove these again. We'll drop the knuckle down so we can hopefully tried to get in there easier. So we'll probably go about doing it that way. We'll get these all in bottomed out and then we'll torque them down to the proper specifications. So something you kind of need to know about these wheel bearings is this little ring right here, it's actually part of your ABS. If I had some kind of metal powder, I could put it on there and you'd be able to see the lines pretty good. I'm not sure if you can with the camera or not. I can with my glasses. But there's a whole bunch of little lines, basically, and that is actually the actuator for the sensor right here.
It senses how many times those little lines that are behind here go around and around and around. It tells the computer in the car how fast this wheel is turning. Something to think about is that this is a very delicate piece of the equipment right here. If you had this bearing and you just had your tool card out or your ground or whatever you were doing it on and you just put it down, bang, right? Maybe your tool or whatever you might have put it onto bangs into this and puts a little dent or crimp or breaks it at all. Well, now you're going to have an ABS light. So you just went ahead. You're doing all this work and you're going to put it all back together. You're going to go drive it down the road. You're going to have an ABS light on and you're going to say, "Oh, no, Len, what am I going to do?" Well, did you do that? Did you put this down someplace? Did you crack this? Did you maybe put it down on a magnet?
If you put it down on a magnet, that's also going to cause an issue. It's very delicate. This right here rides right up against where this sensor is right under here, okay? So if this is broken, this is going to sense that and it's going to say that you have an ABS problem. So before you put it on, just inspect it and make sure nothing happens. This one looks pretty great. So now we can grab our backing plate, put it here. We know the bearing's going to go this way. Basically, we have the shorter of the two bolts and then the longer of the two width wise. They're not longer bolts. Sorry. They're not shorter bolts and longer bolts. It's just the distance wise. The distance between these two is very short. It's going to go up here. The distance between these two is longer. It's going to go down there, okay? So it's just going to go like this with the backing plate there. I'll grab that. Okay, so we've got our backing plate. We're going to take it. We're going to try to remember which way it went on. Let's find our bolts.
Okay, I'm going to pull it out. We've got a bolt hole, bolt hole, bolt hole, bolt hole. These two are wider. These two are closer. It's going to go something like that, right? It's easy to figure out. We'll notice it has little air baffles back here. That's so when you're driving down the road and air is coming through, it's going to get caught in there, come up inside your braking system. It's going to cool stuff down. It's also going to disperse the brake dust that's going around in there, okay? So this doesn't go this way. If we put this all together like this with the backing plate sticking out far coming this way, it's going to hit against the rotor, first of all. You're going to know right away and it's just really not going to function well at all, not that you'd be able to get to that point because as soon as you put it on, you'd really know. So skipping ahead, we'll assume we know which way we're putting it on because we just discussed it. We're going to go ahead and get the bearing up on here. We'll get it close.
All right. That slides in pretty nice. So we must have cleaned up the hub pretty well. It feels like it's pretty much ready to go in. We can grab our bolts. We can try putting them through or, like I said before, we can go ahead and take out these bolts, tilt this down. Before we tilt this down, we want to make sure that our wheel bearing can't come falling off. I just told you that it's very delicate back there. So we want to hold it in, push our axle. We've got our axle threads coming through right here. We'll just put our little nut on there. We'll put it on a little bit. We don't have to tighten it down yet or anything. But we just want to make sure that the bearing can't come off. Just start it on. Get a few good threads. This bearing's going nowhere, okay? It might wobble around a little bit. We're not worried about that. We're going to take out these two bolts again. This is the top one and there's my washer. The top one, as you can tell, has a little bit of a bump right there.
That's your camber adjustment. As you turn it, it's going to make your knuckle go in or out, okay? So that's why we marked it. I'm going to grab my washer, put it back on my bolt, put them both together, put them aside someplace safe where I can find it, do the same thing down here. I'll show you the difference between this bolt and the other one. This one, no camber adjustment, okay? So the bottom one, no camber adjustment. The top one, yes camber adjustment. Grab this. Separate them again. We still have plenty of room with our ABS wire, right? We didn't reconnect this. So we can move this. We can pull it away a little bit, okay? If it doesn't seem like the axle wants to come out far enough, well, that's because we put our nut on there. So we can just loosen it up a little bit, just to the point that the wheel bearing's not going to fall off. We definitely don't want that falling off. Push it through. Now, hopefully, we can come back here and we can get our bolt started, okay? Just do one at a time.
We don't need to try getting all four of them at the same time. That would be crazy, really, wouldn't it? So we're going to wobble it around. Try moving the axle. If it doesn't want to go, you're just going to have to take off the nut all the way. Try to get this out of the way a little bit more. Basically, it's just the axle that's slowing us up here. There we go. It's going. It's taking its time. But it's going. I could try to tap it through with a hammer. I got a whole bunch of stuff on my cart. Don't mind the noise. There we are. I'm just going to try to turn it in a little bit with my fingers. It feels like it might have started in. Cool. Leave it like that. We'll move ahead onto the next three. We'll get them all started in and we'll move on. All right, last one's bottomed out. I didn't tighten it up too much because I'm going to be torquing it. It's going to be torqued to 48 foot pounds. I got my torque wrench.
It's going to be hard to get it in here and actually get things torqued down. But we're going to try our darnedest, right? If we're going to do it, we might as well try to do it right. There's one. Sometimes, our socket's going to get stuck. There we go. We're going to move along. I'm going to try to do diagonal here, see if I can get to this one. Try to pull the axle out a little bit. By the way, to get to this point, once the bolts were started, at least one of them, I just took the axle nut back off. That way, there, I can move the axle out further. This just gives me ample room to be able to get the job done. But the whole reason for putting on the axle nut originally was just so that the bearing can't fall off and hit the ground and possibly get damaged. So here we go, 48. Okay. There we are. Just go down here now. Okay. Grab this one. Let's see if I can get to it. This one I probably could have bottomed out a little bit better. There we go.
Getting close. There we are. If you wanted to, you can go back around and torque them all down again. For the purpose of this video, I'm not going to worry too much about it. I'm just going to get my socket out of there and we can move onto the next step. Okay, friends, so here we go. We've got our knuckle. We've got our lower strut assembly. It might be a good idea to replace this strut. As you can tell, it is leaking. For the purpose of this video, we're not going to worry about it right now. I'm going to take our two bolts. We have our upper bolt, right? This is the one that has a little cone thing on it and then the lower one doesn't have it. I'm just going to use a little bit of thread locker. It's your preference if you want to or not. Stuff that I want to stay on, I use thread locker. Stuff that I want to be able to come back off, usually I use some never seize. It's common sense. But okay, so we got the one with the little dippy doo. Get that going.
We got this one. There we are. We want to try to find where our crayon was. Let's see if I can turn it here and get it lined up. Right about there, okay. So I've got my crayon. I still have some of it on there. It looks like it's right about where it was. Now I'm just going to use my wrench. I'm going to use this to hold it still in the approximate area of where that was. I'll put my washer on. The washer went on the top one, which is the adjustment one. You can put on either nut. Doesn't really matter. They're both the same. So you do you on that, okay? I have a ratcheting wrench. Some people would use an airgun or whatever they have access to. I'm going to tighten this down. All I'm going to do is bottom it out and maybe give it a little bit of a tweak. The torque on this is 114 foot pounds. So that's not really too much. So if you're using a ratchet, it might be easy to over tighten it.
Once it gets close, it's going to probably try to spin this wrench. So I'm just going to grab it. I'm going to double check, make sure I'm close to where I want to be. It looks like I can go a little bit more. There we are. I'll double check it. It looks like I might have moved it a little bit. That's okay. I have the tool. Just going to loosen it back up. I'm going to get just about as close to right as I can. I always try to do the best I can with what I got. I'm going to take it to the alignment specialist after this anyways. But let's try to make this guy's job easy and make it so I don't burn out my tires getting there, right? Okay. This one, we don't really have to worry about if it moves or not. It's not an adjustment. There we are. Now I'm going to go ahead and torque this down. I've got my torque wrench with a 19 millimeter. You can start at the bottom. You can start at the top. Just going to go up here.
I'm going to 114 foot pounds. So I'm going to hold this in the upward position and I'm going to pull this down. I'm going to come across so I don't punch myself in the head if it slips. I'm just going to pull it down. This is a click tight torque wrench. So I'm just listening for a click. There it is. It's pretty audible. I could use an extension, come out a little further if I wanted to. It might make it a little bit easier so I don't have to worry about banging up on this backing plate. But maybe not everybody has an extension. So I'm just going to use what I've got. There it is. Just give it one more. I'll just check the top one again. It doesn't cost me anything to do it again. Okay. So we know this is going nowhere. We've got the camber adjustment in. We can double check the mark again. It looks great. I think I did an awesome job. Go, me. I'm going to take this. I'm going to put it back in. There we are. Give this a little spin. Listen for any funny noises.
It seems okay. Now we can go ahead. If you wanted to, you could use a little bit of thread locker on here. It's not really too big of a deal if you don't because right here, there's a little cutout. So once we get our axle nut put on there and torqued, we're just going to peen it over into this little groove and the axle nut will go nowhere until we remove it again. So I'm going to grab it and I said you don't have to do it. So you don't have to do it. But I will. So now I'm going to put this on there. I got my 32 millimeter socket. I got all sorts of stuff going. Just get this on here. I'm going to turn this to the right or to the on position. You could use a smaller ratchet for this if you want. There we are. Now I'm going to bring the vehicle down so I can do the pry bar effects that we use to remove it. I'll torque it down and then I'm just going to peen over the nut and get it into that groove, okay?
Let's do it. All right, friends. So we're all the point where we're going to be torquing down this spindle nut right here or axle nut. You can call it what you want. I'm going to be going back to using my bar again and I'm going to refer to the same thing that I said earlier in the video of when I'm putting it in, I want to make sure that it's sitting very flat, okay? I don't want it looking like a diamond or anything like that so it's going to jab into any of these threads. We want to try to save those threads. We just put a new bearing on. I really don't feel like doing it again just because I messed everything up by not paying attention to this one thing. I'm going to take my 32 millimeter socket. I'm going to torque this down to 162 foot pounds, all right? So I put the bar going down to the right. So as I'm turning everything to the right, it's just going to put pressure and it's going to hold it for me.
If I put the bar over there, it's just going to lift it up, up into my plastic fender and bumper and it's going to be an issue. So here we go. There we are. Now we're bringing it back up to a working level and I'll show you about punching this in. So here we go. I've got a flat punch, okay? I mean, it's circle. But it's flat ended. I've got our little slot right here in the axle that I mentioned to you. That's where we're going to lock this nut down in. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to rest it like this, approximately where that slot is. I'm going to use my hammer and I'm just going to knock it in. That's not far enough, right? We want to make sure that it's in there nice and deep so this nut can't back itself off. That's not coming off, right? So there we are. We'll just give it another spin, make sure we don't hear any noises. It sounds pretty good. We got a little bit of a scrape. You can check where that's coming from.
Probably just a little bit of debris made its way back here. I could use a blow gun, try to blow it out real quick. It's probably what I'll do and then we should be good to go to move onto the next step. So here we go. What I like to do is I like to use a little bit of lubricant here, little bit of anti-seize. Just paint it all over the place, all over the backing plate, whatever. You don't really need to go in the backing plate. Basically, you just want it to be on the hub where it's going to ride on the rotor, okay? Another thing to mention is you do want to make sure you clean up your rotor before you go ahead and put it all on, especially on the braking surface because you want to make sure there's no packaging film on there or anything like that they use to make sure that nothing happened on the way. Okay? I just put a lug nut on just to start it on so this rotor can't move around.
This is going to help prevent rust or anything from maybe falling in or having the rotor kind of sitting a little cockeyed while we're trying to work. We just need it snugged. We don't need to really torque it down or anything like that because we're going to be taking it back off, okay? I'm going to grab my bracket and I'm going to grab my bolts real quick. We've got our two bolts. Just use a little bit of thread locker, okay? We've got our caliper bracket. Just slides in just like this. So we've got our two bracket bolts. We're just going to try to wiggle the bracket around until the bolts start in. Not going to tighten either of them down until we have a bolt started. This is common procedure for pretty much anything here. You want to make sure that you have all of your bolts started on whatever you're doing before you tighten any of them down, okay? Now that they're both started, I can go ahead and bottom them out and then we're going to torque them down. So I grabbed the 17 millimeter ratchet wrench.
I'm going to go ahead and snug these right up or bottom them out and then we're going to torque it down to 88 foot pounds. There we are, bottomed out. There we are. Grab my torque wrench. Still using a 17, obviously. We're doing the same bolts. Okay, and then this one. There we are. We've got two bolts. We torqued them both. We can move onto putting our pads in, putting our caliper on and then bleeding it out. So here we go. We've got our pads. We've got the tin right here that has our little flippy doo. All right, that's facing down. So we're just going to go like this. We've got our brake squealer. That's going to go facing down. We're just going to try to get it set up so it squeezes in. It should move around fairly freely, not too much up and down, but mostly just like this, okay? So if you try to squeeze it in and it won't go in, you're thinking you gotta use a hammer, bang, bang, bang, well, something went wrong. You're going to have to clean up your bracket a little bit more. Try again.
It's okay. Don't be down about it. Just take it apart. Do it right. So here we go. We'll do the other one. It should slide right in. Very nice. Very nice. Love it. Now we can go ahead. We'll get our caliper going here. So we already checked to make sure that our pistons weren't leaking anything. They looked great. The next thing you'd want to do is make sure you clean this up a little bit, make sure there's no debris or garbage inside there, any flakes. So we'll grab our brush. We'll clean this all up. We're going to add a little bit of brake caliper lube here, there, there, and there and then we'll mount it up. So I used my brush. I gave it a little scuffing. I could have probably done a little better. But I'm not really that worried about it. I got my other brush right here with a little bit of lubricant on it. I'm gonna do both caliper pistons just where they touch onto where the pad is, okay? We don't need to paint the whole caliper, make it all nice and lubed. It's really not about that.
It's just about making the contact points lubricated. It's going to help with vibration dampening. It's also going to help make sure that the pad can freely move around as it should. So we got our little fork-y doos on the front here. We'll get those nice and lubed. Okay? That looks pretty great. We've got our two small caliper bracket bolts. If you wanted to use a little bit of thread locker on those, you could. We're going to get the caliper up on here. You notice that these spin, right? We remember that. We got these little lines right here. That's going to catch. So you need to have these lined up with the way that that's going to be. Otherwise, you're going to have an issue getting them on, okay? Just get that like that, this one like that. Okay? I'm just going to grab a little bit of thread locker. I'm going to get both these started. Feels good. I want to be able to move the caliper around. Feels good. We're going to go back to using our wrench. We'll snug these down and then we'll torque them. Using my 14, it's snug.
Let's hit this one, snug. Perfect. Let's get these torqued down. So we've got our torque wrench set to 20 foot pounds. We're going to make sure we torque both of these, one and two. You can do them whichever order you want. I didn't mean to specify that. But there we go. 20 foot pounds really isn't very much. So there we go. Now that we've got these torqued, we're going to go ahead and pump up the brake. We'll get it so the brake pedal feels like it's nice and firm, okay? Once it feels like it's firm, we'll pop open this bleeder screw. We'll wait for a solid stream of fluid to come out and then we'll close it back up and then we can commence with our brake bleeding process. Assuming you had another person that could help you out with it, they would want to sit inside the vehicle, pump up the break three to five times, very slowly. One, two, and so on. Three to five times. On that third or fifth time, you want to hold the pedal. Somebody else is going to come out here with their 10 millimeter wrench.
Open it up, being very careful to wear safety glasses. Fluid's going to come out under pressure. It might even splash up against here. It could hit you in the face. Wear your safety glasses. Once the fluid stops coming out, close it. Have them do it again and keep doing that process until you see no more air coming out of here. If you have to do it a whole bunch of times, you're going to want to go back up top and you're going to want to make sure you double check your brake fluid so it doesn't go empty or else you're going to have a lot of air coming out of here and we're going to have big issues, okay? One last thing, bleeder screw cover. Super important. Keeps the water from getting in there, rotting up this so you can't open up your bleeder screw. Boop and now let's get this lug nut off of here. All that was doing was just making sure the rotor didn't move around too much on us. I'm going to grab my wheel. I'm going to roll it up my leg and lift it with my abs.
I'm not going to come from the front and try to lift with my back, potentially hurt myself. I'm going to try to stay healthy as long as I can. I want to live a long, long time. Hold the wheel. Start my lug nut. You can bottom it right out if you want, as close as you can so the wheel can't move around too, too much. All right, we'll grab the rest of them. Throw one on the floor. We'll just get them all started on. Then we'll bottom them out. I'll go grab my other lug nut. We'll bottom them out and then we'll torque them down. Okay, we got them all bottomed out. Now we're going to bring it down so the wheel's just barely touching the ground. We don't want all the force of the vehicle on it and then we're going to torque these down to 88 foot pounds. So here we go. We've got our torque wrench, 19 millimeter. We're going to 88. The actual torque spec is 88.5. This particular torque wrench doesn't do .5, at least as far as I know. Don't mind that. There we go.
So I did a star pattern. We've got them all torqued down. We're good to go. Great job.
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