2011 Nissan Altima Front Ceramic Performance Brake Pad & Rotor Kit TRQ Performance BKA12060

Hey, everyone. It's Len from 1A Auto. Today I'm going to be showing you how to do front brakes on a 2010 Nissan Altima. It's going to be very simple. We're going to use quality 1A Auto parts and I'm going to show you how. You can get these, or any other quality parts at 1Aauto.com.

We're going to be using our 21 millimeter socket to remove all five of these lug nuts. Really all we're going to do at this point, though, is just make sure that we have the majority of the weight of the vehicle off the wheel and off the ground with the wheel still on the ground, and we're just going to loosen these up, just a little bit.

Now, we're going to continue removing the rest of these lug nuts. The second to last one, we'll just leave on a couple of threads. The reason for leaving this on a couple of threads is so the wheel doesn't fall off and hurt anybody. Safety first is the number one concern here at 1A Auto. Now, holding the wheel, you can go ahead and take off the last one. Sometimes they can be a little stiff. There it is, goes off safely. You can remove the center cover, off cap, whatever you want to call it. Pull this off, put it aside in a safe area.

Now that we've got the wheel off, we're going to inspect our braking system. I put a little bit of penetrant because I know the rotor's going to come off. I also put a little bit on the bleeder screw because I know I'm going to have to open that up. What I'm going to want to do first is I'm going to make sure that we have plenty of slack for when we remove this caliper. We can hang it, but I'm going to remove this clip right here, just a little U-clip, making sure that we're wearing safety glasses. This piece can go flying off and it probably will. We know where that went, down. Now, I'm going to remove that. It gives us plenty of slack for when I remove this caliper.

Next, I'm going to use a 14-millimeter socket on a ratchet. You can use an airgun, you can use pretty much anything you want, but it's a 14. There's one. Get this one. See if I can get it. There we go.

Now that we've gotten these loose, we're going to move on to the next step, which would be loosening up this bleeder screw right here. I'll remove the cover and then I'm going to use a 10-millimeter wrench, or you can use a socket if you prefer. We're just going to break that free and then re-close it up. If we can't get it to break free, and it breaks off, you'll probably need to replace the caliper, so that would be good to know ahead of time. 6-point 10-millimeter socket. The bleeder screw itself looks like it's pretty rusted so if you can use a 6-point over a 12, it will be helpful for you. It broke free. Make sure a little bit of fluid comes out. We know the bleeder screw isn't plugged. Nice. All right.

All right, we'll just continue removing the rest of these bolts. Feel nice and loose. I could probably use my hand at this point. Now that I've got the caliper removed, we can inspect it. Make sure the boot isn't torn, the piston's not chipped or cracked. Looks fairly decent.

Next what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up this bleeder screw and make sure we have a proper collection receptacle either under it or with it. I have a little hose that's going to go to my bleeder, and then I'm going to press this caliper piston back. I want to make sure it goes all the way back. If, for some reason, it doesn't and it gets stuck, you're going to want to replace your caliper.

Now, we're just going to open up our bleeder screw again using our 6-point 10-millimeter socket. Turn that. There we go. Put my bleeder hose on there. If you happen to have a bucket you can put underneath, that would work well. That would work as well, I'm trying to say. We're going to take our caliper piston depressor, give it a gentle squeeze, tighten it up a little bit. We'll hit it again until that caliper piston's back as far as it'll go. One more. Perfect. That looks like it went back as far as it should have to go. You can see that it's pretty much almost level with the caliper, so that looks pretty good. Now, we're going to go ahead tighten up this 10-millimeter head again. We'll remove our little channel pliers here. All right, that's snug.

Now that we know our caliper's good, we're going to move on to the bracket. You'll notice that the pads are in here. They're stuck in pretty good. What we can do is we can use a little pry bar as long as it has the punch end on it and not plastic. Make sure you're wearing safety glasses. We're just going to tap that out. You can go anywhere as long you're getting rid of the pad. If you're keeping the pad for some reason, I definitely wouldn't go up against the meat of the pad, but since we're replacing it, I'm not going to worry too much about it. You can also pry. It is a pry bar. It comes out fairly easily.

Next, we're going to use a 22-millimeter socket on the backside turning to the left. Break these free. Leave it a few threads in. Move on to the next bolt, which is up top. Do the same thing. There we go. Now we can remove these completely. Now, with a smaller more workable size ratchet, I'm just going to finish turning these out, holding the bracket so it doesn't fall. Remove the second bolt, and now we've got our caliper bracket off.

Lastly in the removal process, we're going to go ahead and take the rotor off. We can take a quick peek, look at the condition, and that way there it gives us something to note when we're looking at our new quality 1A Auto part.

We can take a look at the hub while we have it off. As you can tell, it's a little rusted. It's going to need some cleaning on the backing plate. I'd say it's in fair to poor, really, condition. Well, we'll go with poor. We'll skip the fair, go right to poor. We'll just take a little wire brush. We'll try to clean this up, get off as much of the crud that we can, being very careful not to cut ourselves on anything. Gloves are always great.

What we have here is brake rotors and pads off a 2010 Nissan Altima. What it looks like to me is maybe somebody did something called a pad slap, which is a cheap way of doing anything. You just get it the cheapest way possible, which would be pads and throw them on your old rotors and you should be good to go, right? I wouldn't agree. You're going to down the road and you're going to have a lot of issues.

You can see there's rot inside of where the cooling surfaces are supposed to be. That's where your cooling for your rotor comes in. When those start going bad and flaking like that, it slows down the heat dissipation of the rotor, and you get stuff like this. I'm not sure if the camera can show it, but you see all these little spots? Those are hot spots. And you also got these things right here called record lines. Those are from the pad. So you can see the same thing, it's where it rides.

The hot spots, what happens is once your brakes get hot, the hot spots swell up quite a bit. You'll notice a brake pulsation. You're driving down the highway, you step on your brake, you're going to feel your steering wheel go ... That's because your front rotors have all these hot spots and/or they're warped.

So, to do the job right, I would just go down to 1A Auto. You can go ahead and you can get these rotors right here and some quality pads. These pads are slotted and they're also drilled, and they're also cross-cut. If you look really close, you can see the braking surface doesn't just have cuts going one way, they go both ways. That's for extra braking friction. And the slots and the drilling is also for cooling and brake dust dissipation. These right here are quality rotors, quality pads. They'll work great on your vehicle. For this or any other part, you can always come down to 1AAuto.com.

The next step that I wanted to mention, we want to make sure that our hub surface is clean. If you didn't replace the bearing, you come around where all your studs are, around the hub center. Clean this up the best you can. If you didn't feel like cleaning it, you had a whole bunch of extra money, you could also go down to 1AAuto.com and pick yourself up some wheel bearings.

For this application, we're replacing it anyway, so look at this. Perfect. I don't have to do anything with it. I know what you're thinking, "Len, you stud." Use a little bit of copper never seize, or whatever you got. Just going to go around. You don't have to go too crazy with it.

Now we can go ahead and install our quality rotor from 1AAuto.com. You'll notice the way that the slotting's going. You want it to look like a Chinese throwing star, angled in towards the direction that the rotor's going to be spinning. I'm just going to take one of these lug nuts and try to start it on here. The reason for this is to hold the rotor still so no rust or flakes or anything really can fall behind it, and so it won't fall off and smash me in the foot.

All right. Here we have our caliper bracket. I just wanted to show you the caliper sliders move fairly freely, so that's nice. We don't have to worry about bringing those up. We will clean them up in a second. What I wanted to mention is that you'll notice there's two different brackets. There's this one here, and there's this one over here. This one has these little tabs. We're just going to put a little mark so we remember which side had that tab, just like that. Now we'll remember. I'll show the importance of that when we're putting it back together.

As for now, we're going to make sure we're wearing our safety glasses. We're just going to try to get underneath here, try to pry this off the best we can, being careful for anything that might come off, hit us in the face. Now that we got our tins off, we can inspect them. This one doesn't look like it's in too bad a condition. This one doesn't look very bad at all either. If you wanted to, you can go on 1AAuto.com and get a replacement part for that. These don't look too bad as for now.

Next what we're going to do is we're going to take out our caliper slider pins. We can pull the boot away just a little bit. I just want to make sure it breaks free from the caliper slider. See a little bit of rust under there. Do the same thing for this one, just try to break it free from the caliper slider. Pull it out. Now we're going to remove them. We'll take our rag. I got a nice dirty one here. I want to show you something. You'll notice one slider pin has a rubber, one doesn't. That's something to take note of, which side had that caliper slider rubber. You want to make note of that and mark it. We'll put it here. So, I got one for the caliper slider, and I got one up here for the tins. Now, when I clean this up, I'll be able to remember where everything goes.

We want to make sure, as you can tell on the caliper slider, there's a lot of rust there. This right here needs to make a good seal on the caliper slider boot, or else this is going to continue happening all the way down through, and you might get a caliper pin that sticks. That's going to cause braking problems going down the line. Basically, your caliper won't be able to remove itself from the rotor, or release the pads from the rotor. It's going to cause overheating conditions and possibly warp your rotors and could cause issues, essentially. Anyways, basically, to get to the point, clean this up the best you can. If you have a wire brush, you could use that. If you have a wire wheel, I would definitely recommend going with that. We're going to do the same on both of these. Once we get them cleaned up, we'll go from there.

All right. Next what I want to do is I want to make sure that I clean up inside these right here, the caliper bracket. This is where the caliper slider is supposed to go in and out. Can use a little bit of parts cleaner, making sure that you don't have it faced towards your eyes. Just blast a little bit in there. That's nice. If you have access to one of these bore tools, you can use that, a little bore brush. I like to use it on a drill. Makes my life easier. Going in and out as much as you feel. If you noticed that those caliper slider pins were very dirty when you removed them, it might be good to keep on going for a little while longer.

All right. Now we're going to take some more of our parts cleaner in one second. Boy, you can see the crud coming out of there. Making sure it's not facing towards our face. As always, safety first at 1A Auto. All right. I want to show you the color of this stuff. Let's see it. Oh, chocolate milk. Let's hit it again. Ooh. Safety glasses. If you felt the need, you can go ahead and hit it again with your bore brush. For this application, I'm not going to worry too much about it.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to move on to cleaning up the caliper bridge where the tins are going to mount onto. If you have access to a wire brush, you can use that, or even a wire wheel. You want to try to get off as much of this rust as you can, get it nice and shiny.

All right. Wearing our safety glasses and some gloves, we're going to go ahead and try to clean up along here and pretty much anywhere that looks like it's dirty, being careful not to get our fingers in here. If you don't have access to this grinder, a wire wheel, you can also use a wire brush. This is all preference. As long as you're getting it cleaned up so there's no more rust or corrosion on there, that's all that matters.

All right. You can see the before and after. Here's before essentially. You can see that there's a lot of rust and rot buildup. Looks pretty nasty. Plenty of areas for moisture to get through, seize up your slider. Here's where we just cleaned up, making sure that we got along the edge right there. That's right where your caliper boot's going to ride, so you want to make sure that's clean. You get a good seal on that, you won't get any moisture in here. You can see the difference. It's definitely worth the extra effort and extra time to make sure you clean this up. I'm going to go ahead and clean up the other one. We'll move on from there.

Now that we've got our two slider pins cleaned up, you can see they look like they're in perfect condition. I don't see any need for replacement on those. If they were more pitted after all that rust and everything you had seen, we might want to replace them, but these look great. I'm going to go ahead and move on to cleaning up these caliper bracket tins. For that, you can use something as simple as a wire brush, making sure that you're wearing safety glasses. Put it on any type of working surface you want to use. Then essentially just kind of try to clean them up and get off as much of this rust and rot and all that crud you can see on there.

That looks much better. We're going to keep on going in between here, there, there, and of course the back side. You can see the back side, there's a lot of rot buildup there, flaking. You want to make sure you get all that off, all right? We're almost done. We're just going to get here, here, and a little bit right there. It's never going to be perfect. You don't have to get too crazy about it but do the best you can with what you got. And if you did want to replace them, you can always search for any part at 1AAuto.com. Get that nice and cleaned up. It's fairly decent, so now we have both of our tins. They look pretty good, not really too bent. I think that we can reuse these if we had to, and for this application, we will.

Now it's time to clean up the caliper bracket. It's going to be very easy. We're just going to take our wire brush, maybe a little bit of a pry bar or whatever you got, because as you can tell, there's some pretty large chunks of corrosion here. So, we'll try to break all that free.

First what we're going to do is we're going to gauge it by just using a little bit of a wire brush so we can see what we do need to actually work hard at picking off. Work smarter, not harder. I can see something that I can't wait to point out to you guys. But we got it basically cleaned up.

We can go a little bit more, but what I want to show you is ... I'm not sure if the camera will pick it up. I can move it around. You can see that there's some shinier areas and some areas that seem like they go down deeper. This right here is buildup. What we want to do is we want to make sure that we get this off, because when we go to put our pad in, it's going to get stuck in there. You'll have pads that are super stuck inside the brackets. They'll stay up against the rotor. They won't release like they're supposed to when you release the brake, and your brake will overheat, causing your rotor to warp prematurely. Not that there's ever a real good time for it to warp, but ...

We want to try to get that off the best we can. If you needed to, you could also use some sort of sanding disk or a wire wheel, or even just keep working at it with this. Whatever you're into, it's your preference. As for now, I'm going to move along to the other side, gauge that side, and then I'll go ahead and figure out how I want to clean this piece up.

As I'm cleaning, I'm noticing a couple things. There's quite a bit of rot buildup. You can see it flaking up here, here, well, pretty much everywhere, as Jeannie would say. Here, here, here, here, everywhere. So, you can grab a little pick or a little screwdriver. Try to get under it. Try to get up as much of it as you can. The reason for that is because you don't want any of this coming off and flaking off in between your brake rotor and your pad, or between your brake rotor and your hub, or your eye, when you're working with it. Make sure you're wearing safety glasses. You don't have to get too crazy with it. It's all preference, but if you're going to do it, you might as well do it right. You're here anywhere. There is rust flying everywhere. Safety glasses.

We got our caliper bracket nice and cleaned up. Did the best I could. I would say that it looks fair. I don't see any real buildup. It's a little discolored, but we don't have to worry about that.

What we're going to do now is we're going to take a little bit of lubricant. I have some brake lube. Whatever you have for your preferences, you can use that, just a little bit. You don't need to go too much. If you put too much, it's going to squeeze out at some point, possibly get between your rotor and your brake pad, which could ... which will cause braking issues. So we're just going to get that on there. The reason for this is to help keep moisture out from in between. A little bit of rust preventative. I'm going to do the other side, same exact thing. Like I say, we don't need to go crazy. Just try to keep the moisture out. Get it all over it, every place that we cleaned up. Metal loves moisture. That looks great.

Okay. Now we can go ahead and take our tins. We remember we marked them, so we're going to go ahead and put the one with the little flippies on there where we marked it. It should just press in, a little bit of finger strength. Beautiful. The other side, same exact thing. Just press it in, some finger strength. It doesn't seem like it wants to go all the way in, you can give it a little push with a pry bar or a screwdriver, whatever you have access to. The pad will hold it in a little better, so if you're worried about it looking perfect, I wouldn't worry about it so much. Just move along.

Next we're going to lube up our sliders. We can use the same lubricant, as long as there's no dirt or debris in there. Go ahead and lube it up. You could be a little liberal now if you want. That's fine. We're going to make sure we get up along that ring right there. You don't need to go all the way around it, but we do want to make sure we get some up in there, and I'll explain to you why.

Now that we got this kind of going all the way around, we remember that we marked the caliper bracket where the one with the rubber's going to go, so I'm going to go ahead and put it in. I can spin it while I'm doing it. This just makes sure that I get the lubricant all around. Go ahead and work it. We want to make sure that we spin it, because like I said, we put the lube down at the end right there, and that sits right where the boot is. You want to make sure that you have lubricant all inside there. In fact, it's going to help keep the moisture out. You don't want moisture traveling down in here or you're going to have frozen caliper sliders. We're going to do the same thing for this slider and we'll move on to the next step.

Now we're at the point we're going to be mounting the caliper bracket and the caliper. I just want to take a peek in here while we got it all apart. You can see we have a little bit of buildup here. You don't have to worry too, too much about that so much. Over here, we got some buildup. Try to get the majority of that off. You don't want it falling down in between the rotor and the brake pad.

Now, we got a little bit of our brake lube. I'm just going to go along the ear right here, along this ear, pretty much anywhere on the caliper that's going to be mating with the brake pad. You don't need to go up here. It's not going to be touching the brake pad. Right here, the piston, very important. What this is going to do, it's going to help dampen vibration. You're going to hear less brake noise when you're braking. It's key. Some people don't do it. You don't have to. I would recommend it.

Now this caliper's all set for mounting so we're going to go ahead and put on the bracket. Now it's time to go ahead and install this caliper bracket. We're going to double check to make sure we didn't put these on backwards. The pull pins that should be removing the pad from the rotor when you release the brake pad should be up on the top. We got our two brake caliper mounting bolts, both the same. You don't have to worry about mixing those up. Line this up. Start them both in before you tighten anything down.

Now I'm just going to get these nice and snug. I'm not going to tighten them up too much because there is a torque, and it's 98 foot pounds. 98 foot pounds with our 22-millimeter socket. There's one. I'm going to go ahead and hit them again. One more for the lower. Now we have the bracket mounted, we're going to go ahead and put in our pads.

Something that I wanted to note is the little clip that you saw. That's going to go inside here. We're just going to start it in. If you happen to forget to put the clip inside of your pad, you're going to hear a noise and it's going to remind you. Especially the outside one, that'll hit up against your rim and that's going to be fun. So, you can't blame Len. I showed you. You put it in there. Those fit in nice and easy. You can take your caliper. Bring it around. Put it right on here. It should slide on perfect.

We're going to start. Bolt these bolts in. They both have 14 millimeter heads. They're both the same size. Now I'm going to go ahead and turn them to the right, or in this case, to the left, because I'm working from the opposite side. But righty-tighty, lefty-loosey. We're going to make sure we torque these down. Okay. Using our torque wrench, we're going to go ahead and torque these down at 20 foot pounds. One. Two. Let's hit them again. One. Two. That's nice and torqued down.

Now we're going to do our brake hose. We still have our little clip. Comes in from the back side, lifts right up. Should see where it lines up. We'll take our clip. Put it in right like this so it's face up, so you can see your little clip. That's going to be facing you. That way there when you go to take it back out some day, or somebody does, they can get it out. Making sure we don't forget to put that all the way in. Couple little taps. Remove our brake hanger. Just double check everything, make sure everything's nice and tight. This all looks good. We definitely did those. All right.

Next what we're going to do is we're just going to pump up the brake three to five nice little pumps, and this will squeeze the caliper and the pads up against the rotor, get everything situated. Nice and slow. We don't need to go fast. We're not trying to aerate anything. All right. We'll go with that.

Looks like the fluid's very low. It's not even close to the maximum line. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add a little bit of fluid to this. Using our sealed DOT-3 container, we want to make sure that the cap's always on it when we're not using it. We're just going to try to get a little bit of fluid in, get it up to the maximum line. Just a little bit at a time, making sure that you have some sort of clean rag near you. Looks like a little bit more. Might be hard to see, and it is. Looks like it's getting close now. I think that looks pretty great.

We're going to use a rag when we go to remove this funnel. DOT-3 brake fluid will eat the paint off your car if you leave it on there, so we'll hold that. Now we're going to make sure that we close this up nice and tight.

All right. Now what we're going to do, we've got the brake all pumped up. We're just going to come back to this right here, the bleeder screw. We're going to use our 10-millimeter socket. We're just going to break this free again. What we're doing is we're going to make sure we wait for a little bit of a trickle of fluid to come out. It might take a second for gravity to work, but it will. We want to make sure it drips down into our collection bucket. We always want to recycle, save the earth. Give it a couple of taps if you want. Make sure you're wearing some safety glasses. You don't want brake fluid on your skin or in your eyes. If you do get it in your eyes, make sure you wash out your eyes a.s.a.p.

It looks like we got a pretty good trickle coming out. It's fair, and there's no air, so we're clear to tighten this back up, which would be to the right. That feels pretty good. There's no torque spec for it, just kind of tighten it up and give it a little snug, but you don't need to overtighten it. You don't want to break this off at this point because you already just did everything else.

So, yeah, now we're going to go ahead and clean this up a little bit and we'll throw our cover back on so it's protected. Make sure you watch your eyes. Use a little bit of parts cleaner. Nice and easy. That looks pretty decent. We got our little bleeder cover. What this is going to do is it's going to protect it from the elements, make sure no water gets in there and rusts it up.

Now we're going to get the wheel up on here. We have one lug nut in hand. Our hub cap is safe. We can get to it easily. I'm just going to grab this wheel. I'm going to roll it up my leg so I can use my ab muscles to lift it up and not my back. Save your back. Just going right up. Start it on there. Hold it tight. Grab your hub cap. You'll notice that there's a hole right there for your valve stem. It should line up fairly easily. There we are.

Holding pressure, we're just going to start one lug nut. Now we're just going to snug these up. Go around. We don't need to go too tight because we're going to be torquing these to 83 foot pounds. We're using our 21-millimeter socket we used to remove the lug nuts. Now we're going to get this tire so it's on the ground at least touching so it won't spin and then we'll torque it.

Now we're going to go ahead and torque these down to our 83 foot pounds. We're going to go in a criss-cross pattern, making a star on this particular wheel. If you had six lug nuts, it might be a little different, or even seven might be difficult to figure out, but I'm sure we could do it. I'm going to go around one more time. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

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