Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Hyundai Elantra. We're gonna be doing something very easy, a rear brake job, pads and rotors. Easy peasy. 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 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
Now it's time to loosen these up. Okay. 21 millimeter. We got our long ratchet here. I've got the majority of the weight of the vehicle off the ground. It's just barely touching so I can remove the lug nuts or at least break them free without spinning the wheel. Okay. I'm just going to give it a quick crank, not gonna loosen it up all the way. Last lug nut. I'm holding the wheel.
Take off our hubcap. Now we're going to carefully take the wheel down, lower to the ground, and we'll put it safely out of the way. Next what I like to do is I'm going to take off this bolt right here and this bolt right here. I'm going to use a 14 millimeter.
You break this free. These are both the same. See if we can get this off. Use something like this. Small pry bar. Try to wedge it in here somewhere. Try to get this caliper off.
There we are. If we weren't replacing the caliper, even though we are, I would always look along here. This is the piston, this is the piston boot. You want to see if there's fluid coming out of there. Okay. We're replacing this so it doesn't really matter, but if you weren't you would check. If there is fluid coming out then you'd need to replace it, in which case you just go on 1A Auto.com, right.
Anyway, so now we've got our pads. Pads are nice and frozen in there. Those are not going to come out on their own. Okay, so the reason why I took the caliper off of the bracket is because I wanted to show you, you've got one caliper bracket bolt right here. Okay. It's just a 14 millimeter head. The other one is located behind this arm, so we'd have to take off this bolt with the nut, take it out of here, get this arm out of the way to get to it.
Or you could try to use something like a wrench. Just try to get it in between there somehow magically and weasel it out. That's completely up to you. Me personally, I'm just going to try to take off this bolt. There's a nut on the backside. We'll do it that way and then we'll have clear access to get to that bolt.
Let's say that you're not replacing this caliper for some reason, right? You're doing your rear brakes. You're not replacing the caliper. Maybe you know that it's good or maybe you're even checking to see if it's good. What you would do is you would take this, this is a bleeder screw. You would turn that to the left to reverse it out. You'll wait and see a little bit of fluid coming out. You want to make sure you have your collection receptacle under there so you don't get brake fluid on your hands or on the ground or anything like that. It is a chemical.
Anyway, so fluid starts coming out, right. Now what you would want to do is you'd want to push back your caliper piston. So let's get this off of here and I'll show you what it is that I'm talking about in there. This right here is your caliper piston, okay. They sell a tool that you can squeeze it. You just, basically what you want to do is push that piston in. Whatever you have to do. Could try using some pliers, squeeze it with this open. It has to be open. Okay. You don't want to do it with a closed. You do it with a closed, it's going to force fluid up your lines into your ABS unit, start messing a whole bunch of things up, and it's going to cost you a heck of a lot more money than just replacing the calipers.
Okay, so if you weren't replacing the calipers, that's what you do to push back your caliper piston. Then you'd have to take these sliders. These are frozen as tight as they can be, so that's very bad. They should actually be able to spin, move in and out, do all sorts of cool things, you know, in and out, spin, spin, spin. These are really, these are really bad. Part of the reason why we're replacing it. I'm just going to hang that caliper up here so it's not hanging on the hose.
The pads themselves, you would just knock these out of here. These are frozen into the bracket as well. So that's another issue. Take those out. You clean up the bracket, make sure everything flows nicely, and then you know you've put in your new pads or whatever it is you're doing. Okay. So you'd want to clean up your caliper sliders, clean up the the brackets themselves, and the tins and then you can put it all back together.
And if you wanted to see how to go ahead and do that, we actually did that physically on the front end of this vehicle for the front brakes. So all you would do is look up by 2007 Hyundai Elantra, front brake job, and you'd be able to see how to do the sliders, how to clean up the brackets, push back the calibers, all that good stuff. Okay.
So let's keep moving. So right here we have a 17-millimeter head bolt. It goes through from the rear to the front, and there's a nut on the backside, which is also a 17 millimeter. What I'm going to do, I'm going to have my wrench on the nut side and then I'm going to blast this side with my air gun. With a 17 millimeter. You can use a ratchet, you can use a wrench, whatever you need to do to get it off. 17, 17. Safety glasses, hand protection.
here's our nut. Get my gun off of here. Here it is. See if I can get our bolts out of here. Here's our bolt. Just going to put the two of those together. Nice. All right, let's see if this arm will move. Watch your eyes.
Perfect. So now we have a clear view of our 14-millimeter bolt right there. That was easy peasy, and another 14 right here. We'll take both of these out. So I'm going to remove the lower one here using my 14 millimeter and my ratchet with the short extension. I get this one almost all the way out, so I'm going to leave it in just a little bit, just like that. Now I'm going to remove the other one and that'll help prevent the bracket from falling out.
One bracket bolt.
Let's see if this one's ready to come out by hand. It feels like a no. I'm going to hold the bracket so it can't fall down and hurt me. Safety first. Bolt number two, same as bolt number one. We don't have to worry about mixing those up. Caliper bracket. It's nice and stuck on that rotor and due to those pads being frozen in there. There's our bracket.
So let's go ahead and get these pads out of here. I'm just going to use a hammer. I'm going to try to bonk them out. Okay. Bonk, Bonk. That's my thing.
There we are, it's the inner pad. This one. I'm hitting on the metal side of it, not on the meat side of it, obviously. I don't want to damage that. There we are. Those are out.
All right, so it's time to get this rotor off here. It looks like somebody already broke one of the bolts there, so I'm just going to take an extra precaution and put in a little bit of penetrant spray here. There's this one right here. It's just a Phillips head.
What you're going to want to do is you're going to want to make sure you're wearing safety glasses, hand protection. You're going to need a hammer and you're going to need something like this, which is basically just a Phillips head, and it's a bit driver. So I'm going to turn it all the way to the left. I'm a righty, so I'm going to have to come over here. I'm going to hold it twisted to the left and then I'm going to bonk this with my hammer. What it should do is it should turn that screw to break it free. So here we go.
Oh, huh. You would normally have to bonk this to break it free. That's. Something I was kind of expecting it to come off a little harder where that one was already broken. I figured maybe somebody had a hard time with it at some point. So that's what it looks like. I guess I could have done it with a regular screwdriver. Anyway. Now we want to get the rotor off of here. Just going to wobble it around, see if I can break it free. If I can't, I'm not saving the rotor so I can hit pretty much anywhere. I just want to be careful not to hit any of these studs.
Feels like it's starting to come loose here. E-brake shoes are holding it up. All right, so I'm trying to spin it. It doesn't really want to spin very easy. That means that the e-brake shoes are adjusted out and they're hitting up against the inside of this drum area of our rotor. So we're just going to spin this and we're going to look inside and we're going to see where our adjuster is.
So I'm just turning the rotor, looking inside to see if I can find the adjuster. So inside this rotor there's a drum area and there's e-brake shoes that ride inside there. Okay. The e-brake shoes are adjusted by this little thing right here, which is located right in the bottom. Okay. Has a little star on it. What you would want to do is you'd want to take your screwdriver, go through this hole. Okay. And then get so you're on one of these teeth and then pry it. And you want to twist it. And that's going to make it so this part unscrews from here or vice versa. This unscrews from there, whatever. And it'll spin and it should bring it in.
Once it brings it in, it should release the e-brake shoes from the rotor or drum inside there. Okay. We're going to use our big fabulous hammer, safety glasses, hand protection. I'm going to try to bonk on this rotor, see if I can get it out. Hopefully we can get it shifting off the shoes enough to get it off. Okay. It's like it's starting to move a little bit over here. I'll work my way over here.
Get my caliper out of the way a little further. Get myself some bonking room.
There we go.
Just keep switching from side.
Okay. So at this point I had to resort to some serious methods in order to remove the rotor. This was a pretty unusual case and hopefully it didn't happen to you. I had to personally use a little bit of oxyacetylene to try to cut the parking brake shoe in order to release the rotor. However, loosening up the star adjuster in the parking brake shoes should release the rotor in your case or in most cases. So basically you turn the little star adjuster in there and you should be able to release the rotor. Maybe a couple more bonks and it should come right off. If not, you might have to do what I had to do, in which case I would recommend that you watch the video on that, replacing the parking brake shoes on this vehicle. That was pretty interesting and it was a fun job. So for this video though, I'm just going to skip right ahead and I'll show you how to get the rotor back on and get everything cleaned up.
There we are, there's our mess. We have our old stuff out of our 2007 Hyundai Elantra. We have our rotor, we have our brake pads, one with the little squealer on there, right. Over here we have our brand new quality 1A Auto parts. As you can tell, the rotors are in great condition. They're brand new. They're cross cut, right? So that means when they did the skim coating on these to make sure they're a nice smooth surface for you, they went this way with it and they went this way with it. So you can see all the little lines in there. That's great for dust dissipation, heat dissipation, and of course just all around braking for friction material.
You've got your brake pads right here. It's got the little squealer on there. Same thing like your old one, okay. Matches up perfectly. As you can tell, the only difference would be well, thickness, right? It's brand new. You've got five lug holes. You've got your drum inner surface right here. Same thing like your old one. Everything matches up perfectly. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't be a great part to install into this vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you need these or any other parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
So we're going to take a little bit of never seize. We're going to go on the hub, try to get everywhere where the rotor is going to be hitting. I mean do you have to spray the whole thing and make sure you get? It not so much, right? Well, you do want to make sure that you get as little as possible on your friction material, which would be the e-brake shoes themselves. That looks pretty decent. Could I have gone a little bit more? Sure. There you go.
Anyway, let's move along. We've got the holes inside of our hub, right? This is where we took the screws out or the screw. Somebody else had broken one there. So all I'm going to do now is I'm going to line up the screw hole on the rotor. Put that in there. That feels pretty great. We've got our screw, Phillips, should have my tool out here still somewhere. Get it in there. Do you want to put a little extra Never-Seez on that screw? That's completely up to you. It's your prerogative. Might even be a great idea.
Perfect. This screw right here really doesn't do too much, in exception of just hold the rotor on when the caliper and the wheels off, right? So this rotor can't wobble around on the hub. Rust can't fall in between the hub and the rotor and cause a break pulsation down the road. There we go. All right. So now we want to turn the rotor a little bit. As you could tell, this is a little stiff. Okay. It's quite possible. Let's come back here.
I'm just going to grab on the e-brake pivot. When I move it around, this would be kind of me imitating me up inside the car, pulling up and down on the e-brake. Just go like this a little bit. Okay. I'm gonna grab it again. It seems a little bit more free, but what I want to make sure is that there is hardly any drag. Like I don't want any drag. I want to just barely hear this thing just barely touching. Because you know what happens, right? When you get drag, that's creating friction. That means that everything is going to get hot, right? Once those e-brake shoes and all your springs and everything that you just did a great job putting in there heat up, everything's going to expand and they might turn to garbage quicker than you hope. So I'm going to de-adjust this a little bit pretty much in the six o'clock position, right?
We've got our upper stud and then the hole straight up and down, as close as possible. That should be where our adjuster screw is. Take your small screwdriver or your pry bar or whatever you're using, try to get in there. Just give that screw a little turn. Turn one way a couple of little turns. Try to move it. If it feels like it's getting easier, going the right way. It feels like it's getting harder. Well try going the other way, right? So that felt like it was getting a little harder. I'm just going to find that adjuster screw again.
Here we go. Okay. We're getting close to where we want to be now. We don't want to go too, too loose. As you can tell. See if you can hear it.
We have a teeny bit of drag. I might give it one more little click after that. The thing about going too loose is that when you go to pull up on your e-brake, you want it to work. So if you have it too loose, you pull up on your e-brake, it might not grip like you want it to. There we go. I like that. I like it a lot.
Now I'm going to grab my same screwdriver/pry bar if that's what you're using. I'm just going to try pulling on that pivot again. I want to kind of imitate I'm using the e-brake up there.
Yeah. So if I pull on the e-brake, does that. I'm going to grab this. Try to turn it. Nothing. Release it. Spins. Everybody's happy. Perfect. E-brakes are done.
We're going to get a little boot. We're going to put it in here. If we can't find a boot, you can use something like RTV. Use it wherever you want. Essentially you just need to make sure that this is plugged up. We want to try to keep as much dirt, debris, moisture, whatever out of there. Okay. I'll show you what it looks like with some RTV on there and we'll move along.
So I'm going to use a little bit of RTV. I don't necessarily need to get in the hole so much as just kind of plug the hole. That looks pretty great. We'll leave that there and we'll continue on putting on our caliber.
So what I'm going to do, I'm going to take out the slider, take out the other slider. They're both the same. Sometimes you'll see them, they'll have a little rubber on there. These look the exact same. I like to just put a little extra lube. Sometimes in the assembly line, maybe the machine or person that was doing it was having kind of a lazy day and they didn't put on as much as maybe I like to have in there. I like to make sure these puppies can move around for days or months or even years, right? Really. Preferably years. So I just put on a little extra lube. Why not?
This is just caliper lube. You can use something like silicone paste if you wanted to or whatever. This is what I have access to, so this is what I'm using. And it is black. It's not just dirty.
I don't know. I just want to make sure that I mentioned that. I'm not using dirty grease. So I wanted to make sure that the grease came up along this lip up here, so that way there I can make sure that no water's going to make its way in between there. Right.
Our calipers came with new tins. That's always a special treat. That means we don't have to try to reuse our old tins from our other brackets. Let's see if I can get them apart real quick here. That's what it looks like. Okay. All that's going to do is sit right on here. It's going to go like this, but before you put it on there, I want to show you that you're going to put a little bit more of that caliper grease right along here. The reason for that is so when you're driving in puddles or anything really. Moisture gets in there. What is moisture do to metal? Makes it rust. Rust starts to flake and swell, and then of course you're going to have your pads stuck in your brackets again. It's going to be a real issue and I don't want to deal with that, so I just put a little bit of caliper lube on there.
Now I'm going to take my tin and see if I can get it in here. Squeeze it. There's little prongs right here. Okay. What I'm going to do with those prongs is I'm just trying to put them inside that slot right there. Prongs, slot. Line it up and squeeze it in. There we are.
It's important to note that you don't want to use any lube on the outside of these tins where the pads are going to be riding. All that's going to happen at that point is you'll collect dust and debris and everything, in between there, and then it's going to cause sticking and everything in the long run. So if you're putting on new pads, you definitely don't want to put any type of lubricant there.
Now we're going to move on to the muscle. I'm going to go right on this little forky end here, right on the other end. And then I like to go right directly on the piston right there. Some people will say, "Oh, you just lube the whole backside of the pad." That doesn't make any sense. Why would you put it all over the whole backside of the pad when this is the only part that actually touches, right? So all you're doing is wasting grease and you're creating more of an area for your pad to collect debris and gunk and all that.
So we've got our brand new caliper bracket here. We're just going to install it on here. I've got my two caliper bolts. They're 14-millimeter heads. There is a torque specification for these. It's 43 foot-pounds. So you can go ahead and bottom them out and then torque them down to 43 foot-pounds. If you wanted to use a little thread locker, that's up to you. It's your prerogative. You do your booboo. I got my ratchet with my 14. I'm just going to bottom it out.
Feels great. This one on here. Okay, let's torque them and go 43. Maybe. There we are. If you go a little over, it's really not so bad as if you go a little under, right? So here we are. I'm just going to hit it one more time. Feels pretty great. Do this one.
It doesn't hurt anybody to do it twice, right? Now we're going to put on our brand new pads, so we're going to take our pads. We've got our little squealer, the level indicator, that goes on the inside pad facing the bottom. This one on outside. This one has no wear indicator.
Here we are. Take our caliper. It's lubricated. It's the muscle. Get it on here. We've got our new caliper bolts. Throw on a little thread locker if you'd like, or don't if you don't. We're going to tighten these down. Bottom them out. Then we're going to torque them to 23 foot-pounds. And my flyer's ready. Sometimes these spin so I'm just going to have to take it like this. Try to hold my slider from spinning.
There we are. Try to get this on here. Yeah. I love it. Here we go. Let's hit it again. Grab this one. Perfect. Time to get this bolt in here, nice and long. We've got a 17-millimeter head nut, 17-millimeter head bolt. We're going to line this arm hole up with the knuckle arm hole. Peek. Drive that right through. Take our nut. Just going to get it on here. Let's see if I can start it on a little bit.
Here we are. I'm going to hold this side with my wrench. Hit this side with my air gun. You can use a ratchet. Do whatever you need to do. It's a 17 and a 17.
Nice, tight. Let's go ahead and bleed this out. All right, so now we're going to go ahead and go up there and depress the brake pedal several times, three to five times, very slowly. You don't want to aerate the brake system, just kind of step down. Let it up. Down. Let it up. Three to five times. Okay.
Once you do that, you can come on back down here. We're going to open up this bleeder screw right here. It's a 10 millimeter. All right, so we just pumped it up. I'm going to come back down here with my 10 millimeter and open this up. We're going to watch for fluid. I've got fluid coming out. Some air bubbles. You can help it along a little bit. Give this a little tug.
You can see a whole bunch of little air bubbles coming up. Or if you could do it like this. Bonk, bonk. Bonk, bonk, bonk. Helps move things along. So it seems as though we're getting a steady trickle of fluid now. I'm not seeing any air bubbles. I'm wearing gloves, so I can do this by the way. Don't do it with your bare hands. A DOT3 and DOT4 is hydroscopic. It absorbs moisture so it'll dry your hands right out. And of course your skin is an organ and it'll absorb the brake fluid and it could cause you health issues. So Doctor Lynn. Oh, I got another little air bubble.
Cool. All right, so that looks pretty good. I'm going to close it off. And now like I said, you can go ahead and you can go on 1AAuto.com, purchase the self bleed kit, or you can just have somebody go up in the vehicle and do a bleed with you. You can go on the site and check out how to do it. It's easy peasy. All right, we've got this bled out. I'm going to blast it again with my park cleaner.
Very nice. It's all dripping down into my recycling receptacle down there. I've got my cover. You always want to make sure you replaced these, put them on. This help keep the water and debris from getting down in there and freezing up your bleeder screw. Let's wait for this to dry off. We can get the wheel back on there. You'll be good for a road test. All right, it's time to get the wheel up on here. We've got our lug nuts close. We've got our hubcap. I'm just going take it, roll it up my leg here. Get it on there. Take my hubcap.
We've got our little slot right there where our valve stem goes through. Get one lug nut on while I'm still holding it. Make sure it's on there good. Here we go. The wheel can't fall off. Now I'm going to grab the others. 21 millimeter. I'm just going to bottom these out. You can use an air gun if you have access to it. I want to make sure that we do this in a star pattern so the wheel won't get kinked on like this. If I tighten this one up and then this one, the wheel might be sitting like this and I might think I have these tightened down and really they're not, right? I mean pretty obvious. So we'll get it close. I'll come down here. Air gun would make short work of this.
All right. Time to torque this down. 21 millimeter star pattern. I'm going to go 80 foot-pounds. Let's go ahead and go around in a circle here now.
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