Hey, friends. It's Len down here at 1A Auto. Today I want to show you something. We're going to be doing rear calipers on a 2016 Ram 1500 Big Horn. Going to be a simple 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 come down to 1AAuto.com and check us out.
We've got our long breaker bar with our 22 millimeter socket. I'm going to go ahead and break all these free. I'm not going to loosen them up very much. I have most of the weight of the vehicle off the ground. But the tire is still on the ground. I'm turning to the left, counterclockwise. We don't want to go too loose. We don't want this wheel flopping around. You could break a stud. There we are. Now we can lift it up and we continue to remove this wheel.
We've got our last lug nut coming off. I'm going to hold the wheel, put this aside, grab it, carefully bring it down, and roll it aside.
So here we go. We get the wheel off. First thing we're going to want to do is we're going to make sure that we have this ABS cable clear of everything. I'm just going to stick my little pocket screwdriver in between this, pull that out. You can see there's a little hooky thing there. That just holds onto this rubber. We're going to do the same thing coming up. Being careful not to poke ourselves. Or as careful as we can, right?
There we go. Just do this one for good measure. We shouldn't need to but that's okay. There we are. Now we can move this right out of our way so we don't have to worry about messing around near it and possibly giving it a tug, buying ourselves a new ABS sensor. I can show you how to replace that if you want.
Next I'm going to just replace this boot or remove this boot, mainly because I like to keep these things. Yeah, we're getting a new caliper, and yeah, it's probably going to come with this. But maybe you're going to lose one someday and you're going to want it. Keep it in your junk drawer, keep it in your car, keep it.
Next what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab some line pinchers, something like these. Basically what they're going to do is they're just going to pinch the hose, prevent gravity from letting fluid come down. So I'll just put them up and out of my way. Here's where it gets fun. We're going to wear our safety glasses, wear our gloves. Going to pop this free, fluid is going to come out. So we need to make sure we have a collection receptacle, something that we can make sure that we recycle this fluid properly.
I'm just going to pop this free. Turning it left, just like that. I'm going to tighten it back up in a second. So I don't need to go too far. Now I'm going to grab my little pry bar or if you have a screwdriver. I'm going to go in between the caliper and the rotor. I'm going to be very careful because fluids going to come out of here and into my receptacle. I want to make sure it doesn't get in my eyes or my face or my mouth or anybody else's.
I'm just going to push this back a little bit. That should be enough. I'm going to go ahead and tighten this back up. Seems counterintuitive but it's not. Now what I want to do is I want to loosen up these two bolts right here. It's a 21 millimeter head. The reason why I put this back on is so when I'm banging on these, I don't have fluid just shooting out all over the place. Maybe my head's under here, I'm laying on the ground, whatever the case maybe. I don't want any fluid in my face. If it gets in your eyes, make sure you wash it out immediately.
Make sure my ratchets in the off position so I can turn to the left with my 21 millimeter socket. I'm going to remove this bolt, and then I'm going to start it back in a couple threads. Here's what the bolt looks like. So I'm just going to go ahead and put it in a couple more threads, like I said. I'm going to get this back out of my way again. He wants to play games. We'll play.
Going to come down here. Give it a little love tab. Whatever that even means. Okay. I've removed that bolt. This bolt's still in. Now I'm going to go ahead and remove this completely, and then I'm going to remove this and I'm going to drain my caliper into the receptacle bucket. We've got this bolt still in a little bit, keeps it from falling off completely. I'm just going to bonk this back down. I'm going to remove this banjo bolt completely, let the fluid drain as much as I can, and then I'm going to remove this.
So now I'm going to remove the banjo bolt completely turning it to the left. There we are. On the banjo bolt, you'll notice that there's one of these gaskets. There should be another one on the other side of the hose. This one fell into the receptacle already. So I'll put that one down there because it missed its buddy.
Grab my rag. Like I said, I'm wearing gloves. You don't want to get this brake fluid on your hands. It's hydroscopic so it's going to absorb any moisture from your hands and work its way into your bloodstream, which I'm sure in the State of California will cause cancer or some kind of birth defects or something, and I do agree with that.
So here we go. It's pretty clean. All right. We've removed our caliper. So now you could've done this part either on the vehicle or off the vehicle. For this application, I'm doing it off the vehicle. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use a 10 millimeter socket. I'm going to remove this right here and this bolt right here. And these are going to relieve the caliper from the bracket. Then we'll be able to get the pads right out of there. If you're replacing the pads with the calipers, you wouldn't really have to even do this part.
There's one. There's two. Match them up, they're both the exact same. That's nice. And we have two pieces, caliper, the muscle, and the bracket, the part that holds it. Got your pads in here, go ahead and slip these out. Should come out fairly easily hopefully. Let's see. There we are. Got the little ears right here. Those go over this right here, and this one, same. Okay. The same for this one. Just try to pop it right out of there. There we are. We're going to be reusing these pads. Somebody already took a look at them and decided that they were okay to reuse. So that's fine. If we wanted to, we can go ahead and clean all this crud off of here, which would probably be a great idea and see if we can get any of this out of here. This will cause a brake noise.
If we're doing the brake job and we weren't replacing the calipers, we would want to take off these tins and clean up under there. But we're replacing these. So for the purpose of this video, we won't worry about that.
We have our old caliper and our new caliper. This old caliper just came off of a 2016 Ram 1500 Big Horn. And here we have a quality 1A Auto part, comes with the tins, comes with your little crush gaskets here, very important. You want to make sure you replace those. Don't use your old ones. We'll just take a look, see how everything compares. As you can tell, we've got our mounting bolts, that's great. We got the holes where our line goes into, the banjo bolt. We got our bleeder screws, they're in the same area. If you're comparing it and you find your bleeder screw over here, well, you're just probably comparing it to the other side caliper and that's easy. Just go switch them.
We'll turn them. Look about the same that way. This way. We can take a peek inside. Here's the muscle of the brake right here. You step on your brake pedal, forces fluid down through your flex hose, pushes this out, squeezes against your rotor with the pads, and that's how you stop. Single piston. Here we are, single piston as well. So as you can tell, they're both the same part. The only difference is new with a warranty, old trash.
So if you need this or any other quality part, you can always come down to 1AAuto.com and check us out. Thanks.
So we're going to go ahead and finish removing these bolts right here. Remove this last bolt, put it over here with my other one. As you can tell, they're both the exact same. Oh, they're mixed up. No, they're the same. We got our bracket, everything looks beautiful on it. Caliper, looks great. Now we're going to go ahead and put a little bit of lube. So even though this is a new product, it should come already pre-lubed. We always want to check it anyways. Sometimes a little bit more lube than what they decide they want to put in the factory is nice.
As you can tell, it is lubricated. It's just minimally lubricated. So I like to make sure I put in a little extra. Helps keep the moisture out of there and keeps it from getting jammed up on you. These are sliders right here. Essentially if this was still in, we'll assume that I didn't take it out. Just like that. We want this to be able to go like this forever and ever and ever. If it ends up getting water in there and gets rusted up and this can't move, now you're going to get brake pads that are wearing unevenly. They could wear at an angle. They could ear one thicker than the other. Just make sure that you got plenty of lubricate in here basically is what I'm trying to say.
I'm going to go ahead and lift that up. Here we are. You can use whatever you got for brake lubricant. If you've got silicone paste, you can use that as well. This is what I have, so this is what I'm going to use. I'm just going to try to get it inside that boot area, all the way down in there. Oh yeah. That's nice. Going to do the same. Right there. I'm going to go head and put this all the way down in there. Wiggle it around. We're going to get lubricate everywhere that I can. The more, the merrier. Don't need to go too crazy with it though. I don't want to have people just putting the whole jar in there and saying, "Well, Lynn, I put it in. Now look at me."
Anyways, moving on. Grab the boot, just do this a little bit with it. It's just going to get everything worked in nice. That feels great. Nice. Going to do the same to this one over here. Get it flowing nice. Nice. Grab my rag. Now what we're going to do is we're going to lubricate our contact points. Contact points meaning where stuff meets onto the other parts, like the pads, right? Basically if this bracket was on, the pad would be sitting here. So we want to make sure that wherever the pads going to be touching up against the caliper, it's going to have a little bit of lubricant. It'll help the vibration, noise, rust I guess, all sorts of things really. So we'll just put that on there. So the same thing on the ears right here. Some people go more, some people go less. This is good for me, and I'm the one that's making the video. So let that be said.
We don't need to go any right around here. Nothing's touching there. Don't worry about that. If you wanted to, you can go ahead and put a little bit right here. Little bit right there. Those look fine. Maybe a little bit right here. Let's do right here. There we go. Yeah. Pretty. All right.
Now we've got our bracket. We did the inspection on it. Everything looks great. We've got our tins. Let me see if I can open this with my gloves on. Wow. That was easy. Okay. So we're going to want to inspect the tins. You're going to notice that they are different. We've got both these flaps going the same direction, but as you can see, this sides longer than this side. The reason for that is because the caliper doesn't sit... The rotator, sorry, won't sit directly in the middle of the caliper. So essentially you want to analyze the way that the other one is. You can take a look at it. You can even just try to line it up like this and see. I'm just going to go grab the other one, and I'll show you the difference.
So I brought over the old caliper because I wanted to show you the difference. As you can see, this side's longer than this side right here. So this would essentially match up if we put it over on this side, just like that. If we brought this one over on this slide, it would be pretty much like that. And then this doesn't line up. It's very different. So we want to make sure that we just get it on the same way. So we know that these are going to go this way, just like that. It does seem like they have a little bit of slack, and that's okay because what you'll notice is once we get the pads in there, then we get the caliper mounted down onto it, the caliper's going to hold pressure on these tins, and then the tins won't be able to move around. So we'll set those aside the way that we just figured out the way they go. We did that before we got lubricant on everything and all over ourselves.
We're just going to go ahead and put a little bit of our contact point lubricant, our caliper lube, if you want to call it that. Just go up and down like that. It's important to note that you don't want do the outside of the tins. You just want to do between the tins and the bracket. If for some reason you don't have this lubricant, you're going to probably want to get some and/or take this back apart after you get some and put this in because if you don't do this now, you're going to get rust in between here. What'll happen is you'll get rust. Rust will start to flake up the metal, and then these tins are going to expand out further towards your pads, blocking your pads in so they won't be able to slide. Your pads need to be able to slide on these bracket tins right here, move in and out a little bit with the squeezing and everything of the caliper. They need to be able to flow and move. If they get jammed in there, you're going to come out with pad issues.
As you can tell, these pads are worn pretty much evenly. But if you did have them frozen in a bracket, you might notice that they're worn at an angle somehow like this we'll say. From this side being very, very deep. That side might go down very low like that, we'll say, and then vice versa and/or you could have a pad that worns nice and thick like this is and then the other ones just like this thick. Just the whole way across. And that would be because it's frozen inside the bracket or the sliders are frozen.
So the way that this was set up before, everything looks like it was lubricated properly. So it shouldn't be too much of an issue going back together. Now we can continue on putting this back together.
So here we go. We're going to start putting this all together. We can do it right on a bench if you have a bench. If you don't, you can do it on the floor or whatever you have access to, your kitchen table. I wouldn't do it if your wife's watching. Anyways, we can tell which pad goes where. Whether it's the inner pad, which would have something like this, this looks like a circle, which is also where the piston would have ridden, or you can see right here, right here, that's where these would ride. So we know inner pad, outer pad. Very simple. You want to make sure that those go back where you got them from. If they were new, well you wouldn't really have to worry about that so much, would you? Since they're not, we're going to put them back where they came from.
So I'm going to go ahead and put these tins on, just like that. I'm going to grab my pads. Try to see if can work it in there. Okay. There's a little lip right here. If you can, it'd be nice to try to get the pad underneath there, and then the same on this side. What that's going to do is it's going to hold the pad from sliding around on you. If you need to, you can use a small pick or screwdriver, try to pry it up a little bit. There we are. Now this pad won't move around and fall out on me while I'm trying to work. I'm going to go ahead and do the same to the rear. Pry up a little bit. Oops, you didn't see that. Maybe you did. Don't tell.
There we go. See if I can get this one, back to this one. Beautiful. I might have had a little lubricant on my hands. So since I've been dealing with the friction pad or the friction material on the pads, just want to take a peek. I don't see any lubricant on there. If there was, you'd want to clean that off with some sort of solvent material.
So now we're going to grab the muscle. We're going to take note that this caliper has a little lip right here. It does not on this side. So that means when we're inserting the caliper, we're going to put this side under the bracket, and then work its way this way. So I'm going to take these caliper sliders. I'm going to push them back as far as they can go without popping the boot off. If it does, it's okay. Just put it back on. No big deal. Going to put this under here, drop that down and on. Let's see how it looks. That feels pretty nice. If you had some thread locker and you wanted to use that, you can. For this application, I'm not going to worry about it. Completely up to you.
We're going to start these bolts turning them in a clockwise motion. Once they start going in, we can go ahead and tighten them up. We want to make sure we have them both started though. You don't want to tighten one up without having the other one even started. It's going to cause you issues down the line. Generally speaking, that's a good habit for anything you're working on on cars. Just going to snug that puppy up. Grab this other one. There we are, and that was using my 12 millimeter socket, like we used to remove them.
Here's our caliper. It's all assembled. Now to put this on, we're just going to bring it over to the vehicle, we're going to make sure once again that there's no lubricant between here. So here we have our holes. We're going to try to line them up with our holes here. We have our two mounting bolts. Can use some thread locker if you want. I'm going to start with the top one. Just going to turn it to the right clockwise. Get that one started. And this one to the right. Now that these are both started in, we can go ahead and zip these down until they're bottomed out, and then we'll make sure they're tightened up to the proper specification.
So we got these pretty much almost all the way bottomed out. We're going to take our 21 millimeter socket again with our ratchet. You can use a wrench if you have it or an air gun. Just snug that up. Snug this up. Now we're clear to torque them down.
So I couldn't find a torque spec for this, so I'm just going to go ahead with my 21 millimeter socket, put it back on here. I'm going to make sure it's tight. I'm going to give it a bonk like that. I'm going to do the same for the lower one, the bottom one. That's tight. Now we've got our brake hose right here. We're going to make sure that we get our banjo bolt with our two cress washers. We'll hook that up. So we've got our banjo bolt. We made sure that it's nice and clean. It doesn't have one of these gaskets already on it. If it did, you want to make sure you take it off. I know I dropped two. So I'm going to install two. I'm just going to put one on here, and then I'm going to put it through the brake line, and then I'm going to put the other one. And this one's going to go between the brake line and the caliper itself.
Before I do that, I'm going to take a look at the brake hose, inspect it real quick, make sure there's no dirt or debris where these little gaskets are going to ride. Should be nice and clean, I wiped it down earlier. So like I said, I got one on the outside, now I have one on the inside. We're going to remove this little thing. This just helps keep moisture out of it during shipping. You can hold onto that and put it into your old caliper. Going to see about getting this started in here. It goes like this.
Then I'm going to take my socket and my ratchet again. I'm going to go with the 15 millimeter that we were using before to remove it. We're going to do it again. This time I'm going clockwise. That feels pretty good. You don't need to keep going. Once it bottoms out, just give it a little bit more. All we want to do is make sure we crush those copper gaskets right there. Now that those are crushed, we can go ahead and grab this ABS wire again. We'll put it into our three clips. One, two, three. So this is completely secure now. It's not flopping around. It's not going to get caught on anything. We can remove these. These out of the way.
Next what we'll do is we'll remove the bleeder screw cover. We'll break free the bleeder screw. We'll wait for it to have a steady stream of brake fluid coming out, and then we can continue the rake bleeding process at that point. But as for the manual part of doing the brake caliper, that's pretty much done. We just need to bleed it out.
So now we can use an 11 millimeter, whether it's a wrench or a socket. We're just going to turn this counterclockwise. For me, from my point of view, it would actually be clockwise. But if you're coming from the backside, you'd be turning it to the left counterclockwise. Now you would just leave this until you see a steady stream of fluid coming down into your recycling receptacle. Once you have that, you can go ahead and tighten this up, and then continue the bleeding process from there. Assuming this was all done, like I was saying, we'd just tighten it back up. Just like that. And then we want to make sure we put the boot back on.
Let's say we dropped it. It's gone, and, "Oh, no. Len, what am I going to do? I don't have one." Well, we kept the old one didn't we, just in case. Me, I didn't lose the original one because these things are like gold for me. But in case I did, I would have this old one. That's why it's very important to keep it, and all this does is it keeps the moisture and debris and gunk and all that crud from getting inside here, which will seize up your bleeder screw. Later on down the line, when you go to open this up again, you want to make sure there's nothing in there. You get water in there, it's going to rust everything up deep down in here, you'll break this off, and then you're buying yourself another caliper. This should be good to go for a long, long time.
All right. So we're going to grab this big ole wheel. We're going to put it up on here. I want to make it clear that you never want to lift with your back. You don't want to go like this and try to lift it up. Okay? I just felt my back crack actually just thinking about it. I'm going to grab it like this. I'm going to have my leg behind here. I'm going to lift it, roll it up onto my leg, and lift like this, right? Abs of steel. That's what they're there for. Ready. Nice and easy. Nice. Hold it. Get my lug nut on there. We've got our torque wrench set to 130 foot pounds, our 22 millimeter socket. We're going to start at the top, we're going to make a star pattern. One, two, three, four, five. Then you can go around again if you want.
One, two, three, four, five. If you want to go around again, go ahead. Just go around a circle in this time. We know the wheel's set in nice. So we can go in a circle. Some people will still go in a star, you can do that as well. Here we are.
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