How to Check Brake Fluid 2007-14 Toyota FJ Cruiser

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser and I want to show you how to check your brake fluid. So what we're going to do is we're going to come over here, wear our safety glasses, of course. This is your brake fluid master cylinder right here, and the reservoir right there. This is the cap, obviously. On the cap it should tell you what fluid to use. So we'll just pull it off. We'll take a look. Down here it says use only DOT 3 fluid, so that means you want to use DOT3 fluid. It says right there on your bottle. They have other fluids like DOT 4, DOT 5, whatever. You definitely don't want to top it off with DOT 5 fluid. DOT 3 and 4 is hygroscopic, which means that absorbs moisture. DOT 4, 5, sorry, is hydrophobic, which means that it repels moisture. Two totally different types of fluid. You don't want to mix the two. So we'll set this aside.

I wanted to show you a neat little tool that we have here. This is a break liquid tester. What it does is it tells you the amount of moisture that's accumulated inside your brake fluid. Like I told you, DOT 3 is hygroscopic, so it's going to absorb moisture. Just sitting in the air like this, having it open, if it's humid out today, it's absorbing the moisture from the air. So with that said, let's move along and we sell this brake fluid tester right at 1aauto.com. Here's our little tester prongs. Right here is our little level indicator. You're going to tap it. It's turned on. On a level it says 1%, 2%, those are okay. You start getting up to 3 and 4% you're going to want to do a brake flush. So let's go ahead and touch those two prongs into the brake fluid.

It looks like we are sitting at about 1% moisture inside of our brake fluid, which really isn't very bad at all. I'm not too worried about that. So I'm going to clean this off.

Next, what we can do is we can check the level of our fluid. Come right along the side, you can see a couple of level indicators, there's just lines. There should be an upper line up there. That's your full mark. If it looks like it's just below that, it should be good to go. Okay? If it's sitting way down here and it's way past the low mark, you're going to want to top it off. Use the specified fluid, which is DOT 3 brake fluid.

Once you're done, you're going to take your cap, you're going to put it back on your master cylinder, just like that, and off you go. If you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

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