Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ cruiser. I'm going to show you how to do a rear brake job. It's going to be a very easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need these or any other parts you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
So here we are friends. We've got the vehicle's weight, mostly supported off the ground, the wheel just barely touching. We don't have very much of the weight of the vehicle at all on the ground. I'm going to take my 21 millimeter socket and all I'm going to do is I'm going to break all these lug nuts free. You don't have to unscrew them very far. We just want to make it nice and easy so when we have the wheel up in the air, it's not spinning while we're trying to break these free. They're all nice and loose, they're not super loose. Now we can go ahead and raise the vehicle so the wheels off the ground. We'll take off all the lug nuts and get the wheel off safely.
We're going to hold the wheel and I'm going to leave this lug nut on just a little bit and remove my last one here. 21 millimeters. Hold the wheels so it can't fall. Set this down, roll it out of the way so it's in a safe position.
Okay, friends, one of the first things we're going to want to do while the caliper's still on, it's easier this way. So, I'm going to make sure that I have a recycling receptacle for any wasted fluid. I want some hose pliers that's just little crimpers, 10 millimeter and just a little pry bar so I can push back the caliper. I'm going to go ahead and put on my little hose crimpers. pen this up. You always want to wear safety glasses and hand protection of course. Brake fluids hydroscopic so it'll absorb moisture from your skin. It'll also absorb into your skin, could cause issues.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go between the caliper and the pad. If you can get your pry bar in there. I'm just gonna go like this. What that's doing is it's pushing the caliper piston in, compressing it. Here we are. That's good. Caliper piston is all the way in. Perfect. So now we don't need a special caliper tool to do that. I'm just going to close this up. We're going to bleed it out afterwards so don't worry about air at this point. Grab this, bring it up. Let all our wasted fluid go into the recycling receptacle. There we are. So here we go. We're going to remove this bolt right here, this bolt right here. These are caliper slider bolts. They're 17 millimeters. You can use an air gun or a ratchet, whatever you have, but it's a 17 millimeter.
Let's see if that's ready to come out. I'll show you what it looks like. So that's what your slider looks like. I'm going to go ahead and push it in a little bit. Just like that. Get my socket off of here. I'm going to leave that in there for now. That's just going to help keep the caliper from pivoting and hurting me when I do this. Bonk. Okay. It feels like it's pretty much all the way unscrewed. I think it's just vacuum at this point holding it in. Get my socket off of here. Don't tell my tool guy I did that. Let's see if I can get this out. Caliper slider, set that aside. Get this one out again, caliper slider number two. They're the same as the other one. We don't have to worry about mixing them up. We'll get our caliper off of there. Now is a perfect time to take a good look at it. You want to make sure that you don't have any fluid coming around here.
If you see brake fluid coming out from right there, you need to replace it. Okay? That means you have a brake fluid leak. This is under high pressure. When you step on your brake it forces fluid through your master cylinder, ABS unit, down the lines into here and then this is the muscle of your brake, the part that gives it a nice squeeze creates friction between your pads and your rotor. So, if this is leaking fluid every time you step on the brake fluid's going to come out of here it might get on your brake pads or even any of your friction material, your rotor or whatever and cause an issue. This one looks good. I don't see any reason why we won't be able to reuse it. We'll set this aside. You definitely don't want to let it hang. You don't want anything hanging like this for a long period of time. It could put a tug on your brake hose. You don't want to cause any damage to that. Okay? So let's move along.
We've got our brake pads here. Now's a good time to see if we can knock them out of here. There's one, still in good condition. The purpose of this video is to show you how to do it, so I'm just going to go ahead and replace it. We'll get our old one out of here. Another one, set it aside. Now we're going to take off the bracket. That's this right here. It holds the Caliper to the the axle. I'm going to remove this right here. 17 millimeter, 17 millimeter. Put it on there. Go to bonk. Leave this one in a little bit. See if I can get my socket off of there again. I love it. Bolt number one 17 millimeter head. This one's probably ready to come out by hand. I'm holding my caliper bracket of course. Bolt number two, same as the first. Set that aside. We'll grab our bracket. Now we've removed our caliper bracket.
So now it's time to get the rotor off. A lot of times you'll find that your rotor's stuck on the hub or the, the axle behind there. What you can do if you're replacing the rotor, we're going to go with the assumption you're replacing the rotor, you can hit pretty much anywhere. The further out away from the axle, the better. It'll cause more vibration and wiggle it off a little bit better. If you're not replacing the rotor, you can go ahead and whack right around here. You just want to be careful for your lug studs. You hit one of these, well, you're either gonna re thread it or replace it, okay. Or, they have these little threaded holes right along here. There's one there and there's one located 180 degrees on the rotor. You just find a bolt that's that size and that thread pitch you screw it in. And what that's going to do is it's going to put pressure between the rotor and the axle behind there and separate the two for you. And of course penetrants always a great idea in any situation like this.
For this particular rotor, somebody's recently replaced it so I could feel it moving around. Lucky me. Now we've removed our brake rotor. You can see the inner surface here. This is where your emergency brake shoes ride. I guess you'd call it a drum surface and there's your emergency brake shoes. So, it's always a good idea to take a peak at those to make sure they're in great condition. Clean up any place along your backing plate that has flakes. Of course, you don't want any of that falling down in between there. So, let's put this aside and we'll move along.
Hey friends it's Lynn here at 1A Auto. I wanted do a quick comparison video for you. We're working on a 2006 FJ cruiser. It's Toyota obviously. I want to show you the rear brakes that we just took off. Here's the old rotors, here's the old pads, and here's our brand new quality 1A Auto parts. As you could tell, the brand new rotors are cross cut. I'm not sure if you can see it, but the cuts go in both directions all the way around. That's great for friction. It's also great for heat dissipation. It's a great quality rotor. It's got some vents down here. Those go all the way through. That's for venting air and dissipating heat. Super important. Of course, the old rotors have that as well.
Something that I wanted to show you on this old rotor is right here. It has this buildup area. That's going to cause a break pulsation. When these pads heat up and we'll say the rotor's spinning around, not the pad obviously. The rotor comes around. When this heats up, it's going to swell up even further than what it is. You're going to feel a break pulsation, bump, bump, bump, bump. So this consumer probably felt a brake pulsation and that would be the culprit right there. As you can tell, our brand new quality part doesn't have anything like that. I won't assume that it should at any point. I'll move this out of the way.
Just to show you the size comparison. As you can tell, same exact diameter. It feels great. Get the same exact height so that means that the hat and everything's the same depth, very important. And of course it's got the same six lug holes in there. These are just extra holes by the way. That's the little screw hole and everything like that. It has the same thing inside the old rotor, six lug holes, same exact rotor except better quality I would say. So, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't feel great installing this into this vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you need this or any other part, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks
Okay. So right here, this is your axle, the axle hub, and that's right where your rotor is going to ride on your brand new quality 1A Auto part. The only problem with this is look at it. It's just in really poor condition it has a whole bunch of raised areas. It's all rusted, it's all rusted up. So, what I would like to do is clean this up the best I can, get a nice smooth surfaceo, and of course use a little bit of maybe copper Never Seez on there and make it so this won't hopefully do this again in the future. When you have little swell areas, it might cause the rotor to be a little bit off kilter and then you're going to have a brake pulsation and of course the driving pulsation. I'll set this aside.
Show you along the backing plate. You can see there's a whole bunch of areas that have rot and rust buildup. Okay. You want to make sure you get the majority of that off the best you can. Okay? Just go around the whole thing. You don't have to use a small pocket screwdriver. You can use whatever you've got. But try to get the majority of this off because if it falls down inside here, it's going to be inside the drum area of your rotor and it could get in between your brake shoe in the rotor and cause an issue. So we'll get that cleaned up. Another thing that I like to point out, you always want to check your springs, make sure they don't look like they're stretched. These look like they're in great condition. If yours are rusted and look like they're stretched maybe the coils are separating. You'd want to replace those.
If your emergency brake shoes are worn low, which these aren't, you'd want to replace those. Now is a perfect time because you've got it all apart. Another thing is, is right down here this is your emergency brake adjustment. So, if you notice that when you pull up on your emergency brake before and it goes all the way up and you barely get any grip on the emergency brake you'd want to just adjust this out a little bit. I can show you how to do that as well. So, let's get going cleaning this up and we'll move along. Okay. So, there's multiple things we can use. Pocket screwdriver, little brush, big brush, whatever you want to do. You do you booboo. I'm just going to get this cleaned up, get my safety glasses on, hand protection. Something like that. The most important part is of course the inside area of it. Out here it doesn't really matter as much. I don't want to say it doesn't matter, but I'm going to go with as much.
So, here we go. I've got the backing plate cleaned up fairly well. I'm going to move along. I'm going to try to clean up this hub area. Okay. Here's a brush, smaller brush. Whatever you want to do. Maybe something like this. We sell these right on our site. 1AAuto.com. Want to wear your safety glasses, hand protection. This is a little sanding disk. It's going to do a great job scuffing this up. All the areas I can grab and then I'll go ahead and move along with something else.
Now as you can tell I got the hub cleaned up pretty well. I just got to try to get behind these lug studs here. Okay. I'm going to use a simple tool like this. It just goes over that. Looks much better. If you had to and you didn't have this tool, you can use something like a screwdriver. Just try to get off whatever big chunks you can, get it as smooth as possible. Okay? You do you boo-boo whatever you've got to do. Okay? You just want it to be as clean as possible. Makes all the difference in the world when it comes to your brakes and the brake pulsation or even a tire shake. So now we're going to go ahead and clean this down. We're going to use a little bit of parts cleaner. It's aerosol based so it's going to force fluid out. And of course stuff's going gonna blow back. Safety glasses, hand protection, keep your mouth closed. And of course a receptical to collect whatever's going to land on the ground/floor.
I'll move away. Let that dry off a little bit. Okay, so we want to clean the rotor braking surfaces. So, we've got one here, one on the other side, and of course this one. This is where your e-brake shoes ride. So, that's a braking surface as well. Just put a little bit of parts cleaner on your rag. Clean your surfaces, it's very important. It comes with material on it to help prevent moisture seeping in just during shipping and packaging and all that. There we are. Okay.
So, now it's time we're going to put a little bit of Never Seez on here. Right down here is our adjuster. I'll show you what we're gonna do. We're gonna assume that the Never Seez is on there. We've got our rotor and put it on. Give a little wiggle. If you feel like your e-brake shoes are grabbing onto this, like you can't turn the rotor because it went on hard you'd want to adjust your e-brake shoes. This is very loose. I don't feel as though the brake shoes are grabbing onto it all. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust the e-brake shoes out a little bit. So when I do this, I can hear them just barely touching. I want to hear like a little bu that's it. Not a heavy, okay. No extra charge for the sound effects by the way.
So, I've got my copper Never Seez. I'm going to try to get it all out all around here. Hopefully without getting it on the shoes. That looks like it's pretty good. Right under here is our adjuster. To adjust this out, I'm going to be pulling this this way. I'm just going to give it a couple of little cranks. I'm going to grab my rotor and I'm going to give it a shot.If you have to force your rotor on, it's probably too tight. I can hear it just in there. I'd say that's good. Another way we can test it of course is by going up, pulling on the e-brake. You get it about halfway. We shouldn't be able to turn this at all. Okay, so you can assume that you did that. I think that that sounds perfect where it is anyways.
So, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and clean up my caliper bracket. We're going to get that ready to go and we'll get it mounted on. So, here we go. We've got our caliper bracket. Got a little torn boot action there. This one looks like it's fairly decent. You can go ahead and try to reuse that if you want. For this one right here, I'm just going to replace it. I'm going to be very careful. Use a little blade here. Cut that off of there. It's garbage. I'm going to set my blade aside so I'm safe. I'm just gonna see about getting this out of here now. To do that, I'm just gonna use a small pocket screwdriver. I'm going to work it around. Get the old boot all broken up. Try to push it through. There it is. We have a brand new one. Looks like it should match up pretty evenly there. We'll toss that aside, recycle it. Okay.
Inside here you can see that it's all rusted, rotted, flaking, garbage. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use a little bore brush. Got my safety glasses and my hand protection of course. This is called a bore brush. You can put some parts cleaner in there if you want or you can try it without it first. I'm just going to try to get out any debris that I can out of there. Try to make a nice smooth surface for my new boot. You might have to use your pocket screwdriver or whatever. Just try to grind it up a little bit, see if there's any big chunks. I'm getting out a lot of big stuff here. So I'm just going to give this a little bit more. It seems to be working pretty well. I'm gonna hit it with some parts cleaner. I've got my recycling receptacle there so I can make sure that it goes into the proper container. Safety glasses. Just clean this up. Set this aside so I don't have to breathe it in.
So we're gonna take off the tins. Make sure you're wearing your safety glasses in case pieces go flying There's one. There's two different types of tins on this. So we just took both these off the same side. You've got a little tab over here, a little tab over there. Those tabs need to be facing outward away from the rotor. If you put it facing this direction, when you're putting it back together, it's going to be of course hitting up against the rotor. So, keep that in mind. We'll just take these off. They look like they're in pretty good condition so we can reuse them. We'll just clean them up a little bit. They don't look bad at all actually.
To clean them you can use something like this. A little bit of parts cleaner afterward should do it up right. If yours are in worse condition and they had a lot of rust buildup or whatever you'd want to clean them up a little bit differently. You do you booboo. Okay. That looks pretty decent. We just want to make sure we have the big areas off of there, any parts that the pad could get caught on get held up, stuck up against your rotor, cause overheating, or break pulsations, or anything like that. Backside is especially important. This looks really good so I'm really not worried about that.
So, we've got our tins all nice and cleaned up the best we want. Next we're going to make sure we clean up this bracket where the tins sit, the tins sit inside here and right along here on all four. One, two, one, two, one, two. Okay. So, you want to make sure you clean up all those edges. You can use something like sand paper if you've got all day or you can go with something like this performance tool. It's available on 1AAuto.com. Get yourself a little sanding disc, some air obviously if you have an air compressor and then you just clean it up. So, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna clean this up real nice. I'll show you what it looks like and we'll move along.
Okay. So, I've got it cleaned up everywhere, everywhere where the tins are going to go. And then, of course after I get the tins on there we're going to have the pads sitting in there. So you want to make sure that you have any big chunks of anything that might've been on there off and out of the way. Cause big chunks will raise up those tins. The tins are raised up, the pad can't slide like it should, you overheat your brakes.
So now what I'm going to do is I want to get some caliper lube on here just on the caliper bracket where the tins are going to be riding. I'm going to put a little bit in here, get my boot in, and then we'll do the same to the other side. Actually, let's do the boot first. This is just going to help me get it slipped in there nice and easy. Okay. That's what our boot looks like. I'm gonna come through this way. Might help to twist it. I'll show you what I'm doing here. I'm just gripping, pushing, twisting. It looks like it's getting ready to come through over there. See if I can help it along a little bit. It's not going to pull through.
I'm just going to take a peek inside, make sure that it's not twisted still. Yeah, looks good to me. Perfect. Caliper lube. You don't need too much. All you need is enough to protect the metal from moisture setting in and causing it to rust, rot, and swell. All that is no good. Okay. I use caliper lube. You can use silicone paste, maybe a little bit of grease. You need something that withstands heat though cause well breaks are friction. Friction creates heat. So, we got that boot in there. Got it lubricated. We're going to do the same to the other side.
So now it's time to talk about our Caliper sliders. These theoretically will go in just like this is what we'll say. They're going to be inside this tube right here. So, if they're all gunked up like what this one is when that tries to go in and out even though you've got lubricant on it, it's still gonna bind up. It's going to continue binding more and more, especially as the lubricant wears away. So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to clean up these caliper sliders the best I can. I'll show you what that'll look like at that point, and then we'll move along.
So, as you can tell, they look much better at this point. They're a little pitted. I'm really not too worried about the pitting. I would be worried if there was raised areas but these pits go in. If you want to replace them of course you can go ahead and do that. I don't see any reason why you should have to replace these at this point. So, I'm just going to go ahead and reuse them. When it comes time to put the caliper back onto the bracket we're going to make sure we put a little bit of lubricant but for now for transit purposes I'm not going to worry about putting a whole bunch of grease on them and then moving them. So, I would just use a little bit of caliper bracket lube and go with that.
So, to move along, we've got our tins. These tins need to go back on the caliper bracket. You remember I showed you they got the little tab here. This one is the opposite. It's got a tab on the opposite side. So, you want to make sure that those tabs face outward, not inward like I explained before. So, here we are. We've got it lubricated just on the bracket. We're not doing it on the outside of these tins. It's very important not to. Okay. Take it, just going to press it in. Just like that. Make sure it's sitting in there good.
When you press it in, you want to make sure that any extra grease that you might've had in there didn't come pressing through. So, if I can see through here, I see a little bit of grease, if there's any big globs you could just push it down along the bracket if you want. It's not gonna hurt anything. Or you could wipe it off with a rag. Whatever you want to do, you just don't want to have big globs. Big glob gets on the rotor, comes around, gets on the pad. Now you've got grease in between your friction material. That's going to cause an issue. Let's go ahead and do the other side now. Same as the first. Easy peasy There we are, squeeze it. Take a peek. Any globs of grease, wipe 'em away. No more tears. There we are. Let's go ahead and get this caliper bracket installed.
We've got our bracket that we just finished cleaning up. We're going to get it over here. Got our two caliper bracket bolts, 17 millimeter heads. These have a torque of 78 foot pounds. So, once you tighten them up, snug 'em a little bit, you're going to torque it down to 78 foot pounds. If you want to use some thread locker, it's up to you. It's your prerogative. Here we are torqued, torqued. Let's move along.
We've got our caliper here. Okay. You want to make sure you clean it up. Let's see if I can find my pocket screwdriver, safety glasses of course. Things are going to be flying. Just try to get off any big flakes I can find. You can use a brush if you want, you can use whatever you want really. Just clean it off. Okay. This is your piston, that's your piston boot. We already checked to make sure it wasn't leaking earlier. I remember that. So, now I'm just going to put a little bit of lubricant. I'm just going to use a little bit of the caliper grease. I'm gonna go right along the piston and then a little bit on this ear and a little bit on this ear. That's going to help with vibration dampening, noise reduction, all sorts of stuff. Okay. Some people will say you don't have to, it's really up to you. That's what I like to do and it only makes sense to me. Do you need to put it across the whole pad? No. Just put it where the contact points are and that's going to be perfectly fine.
I've seen it going on across the whole pad and all that does is just accumulate junk, road debris, and dirt, and all that. I don't want to worry about that. I just want it right where the contact points are. Okay. Lubricated, lubricated, lubricated, boom. We'll grab our pads. I'm just going to slide it right into the bracket. See if I can get it going here. It should slide right in. If you have to force it, or hammer it, or anything like that might be a good idea to clean up your bracket again cause no offense it must not be clean enough. That slid in nice and easy. I can move 'em. I don't have to worry about sticking pads, overheating my brakes that I just worked so hard on. Perfect. Grab our caliper, make sure that the hose isn't twisted around. We didn't take the caliper and make a little curly Q here. That looks pretty great. I'm just going to slide it right over. Make sure that our boots aren't getting pinned over. Here we are. Cool.
Grab our sliders that we just cleaned up. Use some caliper grease. You can use silicone paste, you can use whatever you want. And the color of this is black. It's not just filthy or anything like that it's just black. So FYI. I'm not using old grease or anything. Here we are. It looks pretty great. If you wanted to use a little bit of thread locker up here you could. These are both the same so you don't have to worry about mixing them up. Get it lined up with my boot here. Let me slide it in. Cool. Okay. Let's bottom them these out, 17 millimeter. We're going to torque these down to 65 foot pounds. Time to get these torqued, 65 with our 17. Here we are. That's foot pounds by the way. Not inch pounds. Torqued, torqued, torqued, torqued. Perfect. That's all pumped up. I've got my tin, my collection receptical down there.
So, pop this open. Wait for some fluid to come out of it. Here we are. A little air bubble there. I'm gonna give it a little bonk. Fluid might come out. Okay. Safety glasses of course. This just kind of help shake it around in case there's air. The air should be coming up to the top of the caliper area and then working its way out this right here. This is the highest point in the caliper. It looks like it's a steady trickle. I don't have any more air coming out. Just give the little hose a little tug there. I think it looks pretty great. I'm going to close it up. Here we go. It looks pretty good. We'll put our cover back on there. And well, I mean if you wanted to, you could do a regular bleed too. You can watch our video on that but I think that that's probably pretty good. So, I'll put the cover on it. And then, I'm clear to do the other side of the vehicle the same exact way.
Make sure you cover it. Okay. Now we're going to take our wheel, lift it right up our leg, use our ab muscles to lift it up and put it on. There we are. Hold the wheel. Got one lug nut started on there. We know the wheel can't go anywhere now. Grab the rest. We'll put them all on, bottom them out, and then we'll torque them down. Okay, so we've got our 21 millimeter socket and our torque wrench set to 85 foot pounds. We're going to tighten down these lug nuts. We're going to go in a star, or I guess in this case, a snowflake type pattern. You never want to go around in a circle. You want to crisscross, just like that. If you want to go around again, go around again. 85 foot pounds. Good to go.
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