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Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, we're working on a 2013 Subaru Outback. We're going to be doing a front brake job. It's going to be very easy. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need these or any other quality part, you can always check us out down at 1aauto.com. Thanks.
All right, friends. One of the first things that we're going to have to do is we're going to have to make sure that we loosen up all five of these lug nuts. We don't want them very loose, we just want them to be broken free so we can take them off once we get the vehicle up. The reason for doing it while the vehicle is semi-supported on the ground but still most of the weight is off of the tire but still touching is just so when I'm going to loosen this with my 19 millimeter socket, and I go to the left, I'm not going to be spinning the wheel in the air. Right?
We're just going to get them loose. Like I said, you don't want to take them all the way out, you don't want them super loose. Because if the wheel can move around, you might damage your aluminum wheel, you might damage your studs that are underneath there. You might basically just cause damage that you don't want to cause. All right? So we're going to do this. We're going to do that to all the lug nuts that we're going to be taking the wheels off of and we'll move along.
Now we're going to raise and support the vehicle. We're using a two post lift. You can use something like a jack and some jack stands. All right. Got the majority of these lug nuts off. I'm holding the wheel so it doesn't fall off. I'm turning my 19 millimeter lug nut to the left. There it is in there. Grab my wheel, lower it to the ground, and I'll put it out of the way.
Now we've got the wheel off. We're going to go ahead and remove our bleeder screw cover right here. It needs a small pocket screwdriver, just going to try to pull it off. You can use whatever you have access to. There we are, little cover. Set it aside someplace where we won't lose it. Those things are like gold. I'm going to use my 10 millimeter. Just using a wrench, you can use a socket if you want. I'm going to go to the left, which is counter clockwise.
Break it free. Watch for a trickle of fluid. That lets me know that the bleeder screw is actually open. I'm going to close it right back off. Perfect. So now that we know that opens up, I can either try pushing the caliper back while it's still on the vehicle or I can use a caliper depression tool. It's a little bit easier with dual piston calipers so just do it while it's on the vehicle.
So I'm going to grab a little bleeder screw hose. I'm going to run it down to a recycling receptacle. I'm going to put it down there, I'll open this back up. I'll use a small pry bar, I'm going to go between the caliper and the rotor, try to pull the caliper in this direction, which will in turn push these pistons in to the point that they're bottomed out. Then I'll go ahead and move ahead to taking off these caliper mounting bolts.
I've got my hose, just goes down to my recycling receptacle down there. I'm going to put it right on the bleeder screw, I'm going to hold it on. I'm going to turn my 10 millimeter wrench, once again, counterclockwise to open it up. I'm going to take my small pry bar, or if you have access to a screwdriver, whatever you want to use. You're going to go through the slots in your caliper, try to get it up against the rotor, and then we're just going to try to pry away.
Right now, the caliper's moving. You can see fluid coming down. Okay. Where I'm working up close to my face like this, I'm going to want to be careful not to punch myself in the face. I'm kind of like Tyson, I don't want to knock myself out, that kind of guy. Right? Here we go. Just going to get it in there, see what I can do. Essentially, what we're trying to do though is just push those pistons back as far as they can go. Here we go.
So the caliper can move around quite a bit. I'm just going to push it in that direction now. I'm going to see about just going directly against the pistons. It's kind of hard to see, I'm sure, from your angle. I'll show you once I get the caliper off what I actually physically did under there. Just go here. I'm being very careful not to try to poke up against any boots that are in there. You don't want to damage any of your caliper boots. That feels pretty good.
I'll just give it one second to let any air that I might have pushed up in there just to burp its way out. It's going to come down the tube. I don't need to wait for too long because I'm going to end up bleeding this out in the end anyway. So that seems pretty good. Let's close it off, get my wrench off of there, and make sure all my fluid gets down into my hose, nothing gets on the floor or the ground or whatever you're working under, my eyes.
I'll set this aside. All right, so I got myself a little caliper hook. I want to make sure that I have this ready in that hand so I can hold my caliper. I'm just going to hold it up someplace on maybe my strut basically so my caliper isn't hanging on the hose and putting a tug on my hose. I don't want to put any tears or rips or tugs, anything that might cause a bubble or damage to this. Your brake system's high pressure. If you end up messing up your hose, you see a little crack or anything like that or a bubble, usually you'll see bubbles along where the metal meets on, just replace the hose for safety's sake, okay?
To move along, I'm going to remove this bolt right here and this one right here using a 14 millimeter. You can use a wrench or a socket. A wrench is going to be much easier in this area. So I'm going to start with the bottom first. When I take it out, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to leave it in a couple threads though. Okay? So I'm going to take it almost all the way out. It's nice and loose now. I'll leave it like that.
I'm going to come up here, I'm going to do this one. Here we are. Okay. I'm going to hold my caliper so it can't go anywhere. Now I can remove my caliper bolt. These bolts right here hold your caliper to the sliders. Some people might call them caliper slider bolts. That's what they look like. They're both the same. You don't have to worry about mixing them up. I'm going to grab my caliper, pull it off. I'll show you what I was doing.
Here's your caliper pistons, okay? When you step on your brake, it forces fluid through the brake hose right here and into your caliper. In turn, it goes through these, it pushes fluid out into the pistons, which then in turn squeeze these brake pads up against your rotor, causing friction and causing your vehicle to stop or slow.
I'm just going to go ahead and hang this up here. Actually, let's talk about something real quick. Since we're here and we're looking at it, you want to make sure that there's no moisture coming out from in between that piston and this boot and there's no rips or cracks or anything crazy going on there. This one looks good. I'd say we can go ahead and hang this up and out of the way for now. We'll move along.
We're going to take off a caliper bracket bolt there, caliper bracket bolt there. Okay, we'll get those right out of the way. Once we start them out, we'll leave them in just a little bit and we'll remove the other one completely and then this one, just like we did before. Okay? You don't want to remove it all the way and then try to do this one and try to hold everything. It's going to be hard. Just leave it in a little bit. It's going to save you a little bit of hassle.
I got my 17 millimeter wrench. Okay? What I'm going to do is I'm just going to give it a little bonk with my rubber mallet, just like that. There we are. I could try to use my fist, risk hurting myself. Let's work smarter. You could also use an air gun if you had something like that. A lot of people do, but some people don't. So for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to go ahead and do it caveman style.
I'm going to use my 17 on the top now, same thing. I've got my safety glasses on. Here we are, nice and loose. This one, nice and loose. Cool. I'm going to put away my wrench. I'm going to grab the bolt that's hardest to get to. I'll take that one out first while I'm holding my caliper bracket. Come on. There it is. I'm still holding my caliper bracket so it can't fall down, hit me in the foot. You'll notice there's a lot of fluid here. This is just penetrant spray. So there's our caliper bracket.
Okay, friends. So now we're going to go ahead and take off our brake rotor. This is part of our friction material, right? We've got our pads that squeeze on this. This is the rotor, okay? It's heavy duty metal. Bing, bing, bing. It's going to be super heavy. What we might have to do if this doesn't want to break free from the hub that's underneath there, we're going to have to either whack it with a hammer if we're replacing it or if we're not replacing it, we definitely don't want to whack it with a hammer, right?
We're just going to use a little bolt right there. You can find the right thread pitch and everything, screw it in there, and that'll press up against the hub that's behind there and screw into the threads and the rotor and push the rotor away from the hub. For this, we're actually just going to be replacing the rotor anyway.
So what I like to do is grab one of our lug nuts. It's nothing special, it's just one that came off the vehicle, and I put it on a few threads, even a couple more than that just in case. I'm going to take a little bit of penetrant, wearing my safety glasses in case anything comes back, tries to shoot me in the face. Worst case scenario, it gets in my beard. It's horrible, but I can live.
Okay, I got penetrant in there. It's all going to soak in for a second. Like I said, we're assuming that we're replacing this rotor, okay? So we're not worried about the condition about it when we're done. So now I'm going to use my big fabulous hammer and I'm going to give it a couple whacks. This rotor's garbage so I don't have to worry about trying to make sure that I hit just around here just in case because I don't want to damage this. This rotor's garbage. I'm going to whack as far out as possible for the most amount of leverage as possible. Okay?
So I'm just going to go right around here. I'm going to try to stay away from these lug studs right here because if I'm swinging and I'm trying to hit right here somehow, I might be pretty good, but there's pretty good odds that I might nick this thing.
If I nick this thing, I bend over the threads, well, you're probably either going to replace the bearing or you're going to have to go down and you're going to have to get yourself a new lug stud and figure out how to put that in. Or you might even be lucky enough that you can just chase the threads if it's not too damaged. Let's skip right over that. We're just going to hit right here because we're replacing these rotors.
So I'm wearing my safety glasses, wearing my hand safety as well. I'm going to go ahead and whack it just like that, nice and light. I'm going to hold my rotor so it can't fall off and hurt me. Remove this lug nut. I'm just going to try to work it off. There's going to be some rust and rot behind there, as you can tell. Everything's falling out. You're going to have to just keep going back and forth. If for some reason it didn't want to come any further, you're having a super hard time, you're getting irritated, just take your hammer, come from the back side.
So there we go. Rotor's off. As you can tell by the condition of this rotor, it's not the best quality. I know that I just whacked it on this side, but we'll just pretend that didn't happen. We just want to inspect the rotor. It's not very good quality. I would want to replace this with a quality 1A Auto part.
Here we have an old rotor from a 2013 Subaru Outback. As you can tell, it's not in the best condition. It's seen better days. It's got a lot of rust flaking up here. This cuts into the pads, it causes uneven wearing. As you can tell right along here, it's also going to cause noise. You can also tell where the pad is right inside the brackets.
There's a lot of rust. That could cause those to get caught inside the brackets, which would cause excessive heat on the braking material because basically, if these are stuck in the brackets, they're not being able to release from the brake. So they're just going to continue riding on the rotor, which will cause this to heat up. Eventually, you'll get a brake pulsation.
Judging by the look of this rotor, this person already had a brake pulsation. All these spots right here are just hot spots. So basically, once this rotor heats up, things start to expand. Right? When they get hot they expand. These are going to expand more than other areas. So as they step on the brake, the pads are going to squish up against the rotor, they're going to do their job, squeeze real hard, right?
Then it's going to cause these to heat up, they're going to expand. Every time this comes around and hits up against the pad, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. They're going to feel it in their steering wheel. If this is a front brake rotor, which it is, you'll feel it in the steering wheel. If it was a rear rotor, you'd feel it in the seat. So we'll put that aside. We'll just talk about this stuff over here.
This is brand new quality 1A Auto parts right here. You can't get much better than this. As you can tell, the pads are in great condition. They're brand new so of course they're in great condition, brake condition. We've got ceramic pads. That's what this application calls for so that's what we've got. We've got drilled and slotted rotors. This is great for heat dissipation and dust dissipation as well.
Both sides are like that, so that's wonderful. As you're braking, it's going to have a chance to cool down. All right? It's very important. You want your brakes to get hot as you're braking and then you want them to cool down when you're not. So as you can tell, this is a quality part right here. So if you need this part or any other part, you can always click onto 1aauto.com. Thanks.
Okay everybody, we've got our caliper bracket. Now it's time to get to cleaning, all right? Your mother always told you you got to clean up your mess. Let's clean up this mess. We're going to take out our caliper sliders. We're just going to grab it by the boot, give it a little twist, pull it right out. This one has a little rubber boot on it. Okay?
So we want to make sure that one goes back in the same hole that we got it from. It might be easier to go like this and just throw it down, throw that one down in a pile too. We don't want to mix them up. This one we're going to put over here, do the same thing with this one. Check them out, pretty nasty and dirty. We'll clean those up in a minute. That one goes over here, this one goes over here, easy to remember.
Now while it's apart like this, I want to make sure that I'm wearing my safety glasses and my hand protection because I'm going to be using a chemical at this point. I'm going to spray inside this hole. If you have access to a straw, maybe this one came with it and it did. I'm just going to throw it on there real quick, making sure I'm not aiming at my face, of course. There we are.
Okay. Aiming away from my face, I'm going to try to spray into this hole. As I spray in, stuff is going to want to come out. All right? That's why I didn't want to have my face there. Last thing I want to do is get that in my eyes, my mouth, my anything really. Okay? I'm going to let that sit in there for a second, just a little bit of parts cleaner. It's going to eat away at that lube and gunk that's all inside there. Hopefully we'll get it cleaned up nice.
We're going to use something like this. It's a boar brush. I'm just going to put it in there. I'm going to power it up and it's going to spin and clean it all out, okay? That's what I'm going to do. Okay? We'll do the same thing to the other one. Nice. We're going to go over our recycling receptacle, put it in here. I'm going to spray a little bit more, away from my face. There we are. Let's clean that out. It's a new can so it had extra power behind it. Nice.
Okay? We'll take a look inside. As long as they look nice and clean in there, you don't see any more gunk, it should be good enough. I'm going to remove our bucket, get it away from my face so I don't have to breathe in those vapors. There's two different tins on these brackets. We've got one tin that has these right here and one tin that does not. So when we put this back together, we want to put it back the exact way that we took it off. Okay?
Does not have it, does have it. Here we go. Okay? We're cruising along. If you wanted to make your bracket nice and shiny and clean, you can go ahead and use a rag, some more of your parts cleaner. Make it all shiny and red or however this person wanted it to look. That's up to you or whoever is doing the job. It's their prerogative. It's really up to you how good you want it to look. I'll clean it up so it looks fairly decent, but I'm not too worried about that.
Let's move onto the important stuff. Right inside here is where these tins are going to ride. Okay? It just goes in here like that. So what happens is in between there and the tin, moisture and dirt and crud, and well if you live in New England, God knows what gets inside there. Starts to corrode, starts to lift up the tin, your pads get stuck in your brackets, your pads get stuck in the brackets. Warm up your rotors, you have an overheating condition. You just wasted all this time doing a brake job.
So we're going to clean it up. I'm using something like a wire brush. You might have one with a nice long handle. I like it nice and short like this so I just broke it off. Makes it easier for me to hold onto. Some people would prefer it long and that's okay. It's all preference at that point, right? You do you, boo boo. Going to get this cleaned up. Looks pretty decent.
We can go inside here. If you see any big flakes of anything, just clean it up in there too. You don't have to go too crazy in there. Basically, if there was large flakes you'd want to just clean it up so it doesn't hit up against the rotor. Now we'll do the same thing to the other side. Okay? Turn it. Okay, looks pretty good. I'll set that aside. I'm going to grab the tins, got a lot of muck in there. I'll just clean those up.
The odds that you're going to get them perfectly cleaned and nice and shiny, well not so much right? But as long as we try, we do the best we can, who can ask for more? Just try to get it cleaned up, okay? You already got it apart. Here we are. We'll do both sides of them. Here we are. This one looks pretty decent. Like I said, it's not going to be 100% perfect. It looks pretty good. There isn't really any big lips or anything.
If you saw some parts that seemed like they were sticking up quite a bit, just use your pocket screwdriver, you know? Go right along here, try to get out whatever feels like it's lifting up to you. It's your prerogative, it's your car or the car you're working on. Do the best you can for what you got. Okay? Set it aside. We're going to do the same thing to the other one and then we'll move onto the next step of cleaning our pins.
So here we go. I finished cleaning up this tin as good as I could, this one as good as I could. Let's move onto the slider pins. So here's the pin. It's a metal piece. Don't mind that, that's just part of this thing. It's a piece of metal, it's a little shaft. Right? This is just a boot. The boot actually comes off. We can put that right aside. Now we've got the actual pin, so we can take a look at it.
As you can tell, it's pretty rusted going up along here. Let me get the rag out of the way. Sorry. It's rusted going up along here. So what's going to happen is the rust is going to build up, it's going to push this boot away, and it's going to let moisture in. Moisture gets in here, works its way in between your slider and in between your bracket, starts rotting up. Next thing you know, your slider can't move.
So this right here would've caused a major issue going down the road if it went too much further. Moisture would've continued in, we would've have a sticking, not a sticking piston, sorry. A sticking slider situation and we would've had brake pad issues and probably an overheat condition. So here we go. We're going to clean this up the best we can. We can take our clean rag or dirty rag, whatever you got.
I'm just going to try to clean that off. We'll bring our recycling bucket over and use a little bit of parts cleaner, holding it away from my face like always. I'm wearing my gloves so my hands are safe, very important. Safety is key. I'm just going to use my wire brush again, try to clean this up all around there. If the wire brush doesn't do it, you might need a wire wheel. Sorry.
If you don't have access to a wire wheel and your slider pin looks like this when you're done, I would say just try to order some slider pins because this is just going to cause an issue down the line. You're going to end up calling us up and trying to get another set of brakes sooner than you want. So I'm going to bring this over to the wire wheel, get them cleaned up. I'm going to do the same thing to the other one at the same time.
We're going to clean out the inside of these boots. The boots still have a lot of old grease inside there. We want to try and get out as much of that as we can and replace it with new grease. So we'll go clean up the pins and we'll be right back. All right, so I spent a little bit of time. I cleaned these up. In all honesty, it probably wouldn't have worked with something like this.
A little wire brush, I never would've gotten all that off. Judging by the look of this caliper pin right here, you can tell it's pretty pitted. That means that it was pretty rotted, right? The moisture really soaked into that metal. It wreaked havoc on it. If you wanted to, you could go ahead and replace something like this. I think that it should be fine. I think that it would still make a pretty good seal.
So what I would do is I would just make sure that I use plenty of lubricant on it, make sure I get it all the way up to here where the boot's going to be riding. Plenty of lubricant in there. That way, no moisture can make its way in and through and then down into the slider pin and cause havoc. Okay?
So moving on, we're going to clean up our little caliper boots here. All right? This is where the slider rides inside of and it keeps the moisture out of our caliper bracket. An easy way to do this, I'm just going to grab my recycling receptacle again. I've got my parts cleaner, holding it away from my face, spraying there.
Okay. Everything is nice and wet. I'm going to use my little tool again. I'm going to go nice and slow. I don't want to rip this boot. Okay? All I want to do is just get it moving around in there, try to have it break up any grease that's hanging out in there, any dirt and grunge. See? I got it going through. Now I'm going to slow it down, I'm going to try to pull it off. Okay? Set that aside, use this again.
Just squish it. If you're not wearing gloves, do not get any parts cleaner or chemicals on your hands. It's very dangerous for you. Now I'm going to just take my clean rag or clean-ish rag, run it through just like that. I'm just going to take it, rub my boot just like this. That's going to make it touch all up against that rag, hopefully collect as much of that dirty gunk inside there as possible. We'll set this aside so I don't breathe in the fumes anymore.
We can look inside. As long as you get the majority of that out of there, I would say it's pretty good. I'll take a peek. I think it looks pretty darn good, if you ask me. We'll set that aside, we'll do the same thing to the other one, and we can move onto the next step. So here we go, everybody. We've got both of our boots clean, got our pins clean, tins clean, bracket's nice and clean. Let's get ready to lube up.
So we've got our caliper lubrication right here. You can use what you've got. If you've got some kind of silicone paste or whatever, you want to use something that isn't going to dissipate when the brakes heat up though. Okay? You don't want to use Vaseline or whatever. It's basically just going to liquefy. It's going to melt down, just run all along, could get even on your braking material.
So if you use something that melts down, it starts squeezing out, maybe it gets onto here, gets in between your pad and your rotor, you're not going to have great friction, right? So we want to make sure that we have the best friction as possible. So use something that doesn't break down with heat. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go right along all the places where those tins are going to ride. We don't need to use too much.
All we want to do is make sure that it's going to keep the moisture away from the metal. Moisture gets on the metal, it's going to start building up in between the metal of the bracket and the tins. Lift up those tins, hold our pads. Next thing you know, we've got an overheat condition. Let's do it right the first time.
Some people will say you don't necessarily need to do this. That's their prerogative. If you're watching me on the video, this is just the way I do it. Like I said, you don't need to have too much. We don't need to have big globs sticking off of there, anything like that. We just want it to basically look like everything's being coated, okay? I'd say that looks pretty good.
When we go to put our tins back on, we want to make sure that we have lubricant here, which is going to be applied by just sticking it into the bracket. We don't want any lubricant getting on the outside here. The reason for that is because once this is on and the pad's in, if there's lubricant, it's just going to collect brake dust and then your pad's going to probably get stuck in there.
It could collect dirt or debris or anything else you're picking up. Right? At least if it's under here, there's less chances of all that getting accumulated on there. You put it up here, you're just creating a gunky mess. So let's skip right past that mess. We'll put these tins in. Okay?
We'll remember that this one went on this side. We're just putting everything back together the exact way we took it off. We don't need to switch the tins around. Subaru knew the way they wanted to do it when they put it together. So we'll just go with whatever the engineers think, right?
I'm going to take a little bit of the caliper lube again. I'm going to make sure I lube up our tins. I know this stuff looks like it's black, and it is. It's not dirty it's just the type of lubricant that we have here to use. People might say, "Your lubricant's already dirty." It's not, it's just black.
So now I've got this lubricated. I'm just going to put the thin side, slide it all the way up so it sits inside that ridge. I made sure to get my lubricant up inside that ridge like I told you because I want to keep the moisture out of there. If you feel like you want to put a little bit more because you forgot or maybe you weren't really thinking about that, just put a little bit more. That's fine. The more the merrier, at least in this application.
So now we're just going to slide it right up on there. Okay? I'm going to give it a little spin so it's going to work everything together. Very nice. So here we go. Now we're going to continue lubing our caliper slider pin. Put this all on here, paint a nice picture for your mom. There you are, mom. Come like this. I'm going to twist it as I go. Just getting the lubricant, working its way down in there.
All that's going to do is just keep the moisture out, right? Going to keep everything moving nice and smooth. Give it a couple of squishes. Love it. It's perfect. Squish it down, comes back up a little bit. Very nice. If you end up putting too much lubricant down at the end here, when you go to push your pin in, you might notice your pin doesn't go down as far. It might just go to here. You try to push it, it really doesn't go any further. You put too much lubricant.
Well, it could be a minor issue and I would say that it is a minor issue because all we have to do is take our small screwdriver, dig whatever we can out, make sure you put it in a waste receptacle, whatever you're doing to take care of that, not on the ground or your pants. Go like that, get out as much as you can, and then just go ahead and do however much you think that you need to put on there without actually causing that to happen.
So I'm going to go ahead and put a little bit of lubricant on this. This is the one that has all the pitting. It's not the prettiest but it's going to be hidden behind the boot anyway. As long as we have an adequate amount of lubricant there, we shouldn't have to worry about moisture getting past. So here we go, thin side again, going up. Just like this. Give it a little spin. That makes sure the lubricant's worked its whole way around that whole slot there. Okay?
Then go ahead and do this, just lube this puppy right up. Very nice. A little bit there, no big deal. Okay. This one's going in this hole, twisting as we go. Maybe you do want to twist, maybe you don't want to twist. It's what I like to do. Put it on there. You want to make sure you pay special attention to the fact that the boot actually made its way over the lip right here. Okay?
If it didn't make its way over the lip, and for some reason it's sitting out at a lip, down here like that, and you think you got it on there, you're not going to have a good seal. This is going to move around. What's going to happen? Water gets in there. Mother nature. There we are. Those feel pretty good. I'd say we're good to move onto the next step.
So here we go. What I like to do is I like to use a little bit of lubricant here, little bit of anti-seize. Just paint it all over the place, all over the back and plate, you know, whatever. You don't really need to go on the backing plate. Basically, you just want it to be on the hub where it's going to ride on the rotor. Okay?
Another thing to mention is you do want to make sure you clean up your rotor before you go ahead and put it all on, especially on the braking surface, because you want to make sure there's no packaging film on there or anything like that they use to make sure nothing happened on the way. Okay. I just put a lug nut on just to start it on so this rotor can't move around. This is going to help prevent rust or anything from maybe falling in or having the rotor sitting a little cockeyed while we're trying to work.
We just need it snug. We don't need to really torque it down or anything like that because we're going to be taking it back off. Okay? I'm going to grab my bracket and I'm going to grab my bolts real quick. We've got our two bolts. Just use a little bit of thread locker. Okay. We've got our caliper bracket. Just slides in just like this. We've got our two bracket bolts. We're just going to try to wiggle the bracket around until the bolts start in. Not going to tighten either of them down until we have them both started.
This is common procedure for pretty much anything here. You want to make sure that you have all of your bolts started on whatever you're doing before you tighten any of them down. Okay? Now that they're both started, I can go ahead and bottom them out and then we're going to torque them down.
I grabbed a 17 millimeter ratchet wrench. I'm going to go ahead and snug these right up. I'll bottom them out and then we're going to torque it down to 88 foot pounds. There we are, bottomed out. There we are. Grab my torque wrench. Still using a 17, obviously. Doing the same bolts. Okay. Turn this one. There we are. We've got two bolts, we torqued them both, we can move on to putting our pads in, putting our caliper on, and then bleeding it out.
So here we go. We've got our pads, we've got the tin right here that has our little flippy do. All right. That's facing down so we're just going to go like this. We've got our brake squealer. That's going to go facing down. We're just going to try to get it set up so it squeezes in. It should move around fairly freely, not too much up and down, but mostly just like this. Okay?
So if you try to squeeze it in and it won't go in, you're thinking you got to use a hammer, bang, bang, bang, something went wrong. You're going to have to clean up your bracket a little bit more, try again. It's okay. Don't be down about it. Just take it apart, do it right. So here we go. We'll do the other one. It should slide right in. Very nice, very nice, love it.
Now we can go ahead, we'll get our caliper going here. We already checked to make sure that our pistons weren't leaking anything. They looked great. The next thing you'd want to do is make sure you clean this up a little bit. Make sure there's no debris or garbage inside there, any flakes. We'll grab our brush, we'll clean this all up. We're going to add a little bit of brake caliper lube here, there, there, and there. And then we'll mount it up.
I used my brush. I gave it a little scuffing. I could have probably done a little better but I'm not really that worried about it. I got my other brush right here with a little bit of lubricant on it. I'm going to do both caliper pistons just where they touch onto where the pad is, okay? We don't need to paint the whole caliper, make it all nice and lubed. It's really not about that.
It's just about making the contact points lubricated. It's going to help with vibration dampening. It's also going to help make sure that the pad can freely move around as it should. So we got our little forky do's on the front here. We'll get those nice and lubed. Okay? That looks pretty great.
We've got our two small caliper bracket bolts. If you want to use a little bit of thread locker on those, you could. We're going to get the caliper up on here. Notice that these spin, right? We remember that. We've got these little lines right here. That's going to catch. So you need to have these lined up with the way that that's going to be. Otherwise, you're going to have an issue getting them on. Okay? Let's get that like that, this one like that.
Okay. I'm just going to grab a little bit of thread locker. I'm going to get both these started, feels good. I want to be able to move the caliper around, feels good. We're going to go back to using our wrench. We'll snug these down and then we'll torque them. Using my 14, snug. Set this one, snug, perfect. Let's get these torqued down.
So we've got our torque wrench set to 20 foot pounds. We're going to make sure we torque both of these, one and two. You can do them whichever order you want. I didn't mean to specify that. There we go. 20 foot pounds really isn't very much. So there we go.
Now that we've got these torqued, we're going to go ahead and pump up the brake. We'll get it so the brake pedal feels like it's nice and firm. Okay? Once it feels like it's firm, we'll pop open this bleeder screw, we'll wait for a solid stream of fluid to come out, then we'll close it back up. Then we can commence with our brake bleeding process.
Assuming you had another person that could help you out with it, they would want to sit inside the vehicle, pump up the brake three to five times, very slowly. One, two, and so on, three to five times. On that third or fifth time, you want to hold the pedal. Somebody else is going to come out here with their 10 millimeter wrench. Open it up, being very careful to wear safety glasses. Fluid's going to come out, under pressure, might even splash up against here, could hit you in the face. Wear your safety glasses.
Once the fluid stops coming out, close it, have them do it again, and keep doing that process until you see no more air coming out of here. If you have to do it a whole bunch of times, you're going to want to go back up top and you're going to want to make sure you double check your brake fluid so it doesn't go empty or else you're going to have a lot of air coming out of here and we're going to have big issues. Okay?
One last thing, bleeder screw cover. Super important. Keeps the water from getting in there, rotting up this so you can't open up your bleeder screw. Boop. So let's get lug nut off of here. All that was doing was just making sure the rotor didn't move around too much on us. I'm going to grab my wheel. I'm going to roll it up my leg and lift it with my abs. I'm not going to come from the front and try to lift with my back, potentially hurt myself.
I'm going to try to stay healthy as long as I can. I want to live a long time. Hold the wheel, start my lug nut, bottom it right out if you want, as close as you can so the wheel can't move around too much. All right. Grab the rest of them, throw one on the floor. We'll just get them all started on, then we'll bottom them out. I'll go grab my other lug nut, we'll bottom them out, and then we'll torque them down.
Okay. Got them all bottomed out. Now we're going to bring it down so the wheel is just barely touching the ground. We don't want all the force of the vehicle on it. Then we're going to torque these down to 88 foot pounds. So here we go. We've got our torque wrench, 19 millimeter. We're going to 88. The actual torque spec is 88.5. This particular torque wrench doesn't do 0.5, at least as far as I know. Don't mind that.
There we go. So I did a star pattern. We've got them all torqued down. We're good to go. Great job.
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Tools used
Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!
In this video, we will be replacing the rear brakes on a 2015 Subaru Forester. If you need these parts or other parts for your vehicle, click the link in the description and head over to 1AAuto.com.
We'll take this wheel off. We're going to put a 19 millimeter socket on our breaker bar. We're going to loosen these lug nuts before we take the vehicle and put it up in the air. So we'll take these lug nuts off. Now, pull the tire off.
Now we'll take these two caliper bolts off. I'm going to use a 14 millimeter wrench. Take these bolts off. Now I'm going to grasp the caliper, twist it back and forth, and I should be able to pull it out, just like that. Then I'm going to take a bungee cord. Install one through one hole. Go around here on the backside above the upper control arm. Then come around the back, and just have that sitting out of the way.
Next I'm going to take these pads out. Use a screwdriver to get underneath here. These ones are kind of stuck in there a little bit. Pry them out. Do a little tap, and then pry out the inboard ones, just like that. All right, now we're going to take this caliper bracket off. We're going to take these two 14 millimeter bolts out. I'm going to use a 14 millimeter socket and a ratchet. Pull that bolt out. I'll take the top bolt out, and slide the bracket off towards the back of the vehicle.
All right, to get the rotor off, I can take a hammer and hit all around here. We actually sell these hammers at 1AAuto.com. But in addition to that, there's these two little holes that are threaded. You can find some bolts that thread into them. This'll help you get it off a little bit. So we'll thread these on, and you can take a ratchet, and just snug these up a little bit. Just a little bit. You don't want to tighten it too much, because it's just going to strip it. So if you do that, that just puts a little pressure on the rotor, to make it come out a little bit.
Then we'll take our hammer, we're going to hit all around here. Tighten these bolts up a little bit more. And the rotor is loose enough to pull it off. All right, so we're going to clean up this caliper bracket. We use a little wire brush. Get in here and get all this corrosion and rust out. A lot of brake dust in here. I'll take a flat blade screwdriver, and we'll pull this pad guide out under here. Pull that off and set that aside.
We'll take our wire brush again, and just get in here. Clean that out, and clean out some of the off the back, but it's generally not too bad. All right, so now we'll put this pad guide back in. Push that down. And we'll do the same for the other side.
Next, we're going to pull out these caliper guide pins. We're going to spray these down with some brake parts cleaner, and wipe them down with a rag. Those are nice and clean. Now we can spray some brake parts cleaner down here. And then we'll take our rag and wipe it down.
Pull that out and drain it out. And then we'll take some caliper grease, and coat the guide pin, and then we'll reinstall the guide pin. And make sure that boot goes all the way around. And do the same for the other side.
All right, so now I'm going to take a wire brush, and we'll clean up the hub area. Get all in here. Just clean up some of the rust. We'll put the rotor on backwards for a second. We're going to take some brake parts cleaner. Clean the backside of the rotor, and we'll wipe it down as a protective coating on the rotors. We want to get that protective coating off. That prevents them from rusting. And we'll flip it over, and do the same to this side. And wipe it off with a rag.
We're going to take this old grommet out of the old rotor, and we're going to transfer it to the new rotor. Stick that in. We'll take our caliper bracket. Line that up on the rotor. It has two bolts. Get those both started. Now we're going to torque these caliper bolts to 48 foot-pounds. We're using a 14 millimeter socket and a torque wrench. You can get this torque wrench at 1AAuto.com.
Now we're going to install the brake pads. We're going to just use a little bit of brake grease on the ends of the brake pads, and a little bit in the middle here. Don't get any on the friction material. Now I'll install that onto the caliper bracket, like that. And do the same for this one as well. That one on the inside. That's good. Now I'll take the bungee cord off the caliper. Flip it over. I'm going to take one of the old brake pads, slide it right there, and I'll take this brake caliper compressor tool, and we'll compress the caliper.
We sell these tools at 1AAuto.com. And we'll compress the caliper, so the piston is going back into the caliper. When the piston is doing this, this is sending brake fluid through the hoses, through the lines, back up to the master cylinder, and into the brake reservoir. And because we did not take off the hose on the caliper, we do not have to bleed the system after we're done.
So now we'll slide our piston over the brake pads. Line that up. Take our caliper bolts. Slide these in here. I'm going to use a small extension for the top one, because the brake hose gets in my way.
Now, throw up the tire. I'll stick the lug nuts on. Now we're going to torque these with a torque wrench in a star pattern, with a 19 millimeter socket and a torque wrench to 89 foot pounds. The reason you want to do it in a star pattern is to get the wheel tightened evenly. Before we take the vehicle and take it for a ride, we're going to want to pump the brake pedal, because what's happening is, there's an air gap between the brake caliper piston and the brake pad. So when we pump the pedal, that's pushing fluid back down to the calipers, and getting rid of that air gap. And once the brake pedal feels good, then you're good to go.
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Tools used
Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're doing rear brakes on a 2013 Subaru Outback. 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.
All right, everyone, I'm going to be taking my 19 millimeter socket. I'm going to put it on my lug nuts. What I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen these up just a little bit. I don't want to go too far, make it so the wheel can wobble around. I have the majority of the weight of the vehicle off the ground, but the wheel is still on the ground to make sure that it doesn't spin while I do this. I'm going to take my 19 millimeter and I'm going to turn it to the left. I'm just going to break them free.
All right, so I'm going to continue by removing all these lug nuts. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start this one, and I'm going to leave it a couple threads. Now I can remove the other four. The reason why I'm leaving that one loose like that is just so the wheel doesn't come completely off and fall down and hurt me somehow. Safety first is the number one concern here at 1A Auto. All right, I'm going to hold the wheel so it can't fall off. Remove my last lug nut. There it is. I'm going to carefully lower this to the ground. I'll wheel it out of the way.
The next thing we're going to do we're going to remove this rubber bleeder screw cover right here. I'm just going to use my pocket screwdriver. Pull it off. I'm going to set it aside. These puppies right here are like gold, okay? Next I'm going to take my bleeder screw with a 10 millimeter right here. I'm going to put it on. I'm going to spin that to the left to break it free. Just like that. I want to watch for a trickle of fluid to come out to make sure that it is actually broken free. Once that happens I'm going to close it up. There we are.
If you happen to have something like this that goes down into a recycling receptacle, that would be great. If you don't, you need to make sure you have a bucket or something to catch your brake fluid. You don't want to contaminate the environment. I'm going to reopen this turning to the left. I'm going to put on my hose, which leads to my recycling receptacle. Now I'm going to try to push back this caliper piston. The way that I'm going to do that is go in between here and the rotor and I'm going to try to just push the caliper piston. There we are.
The reason why I'm doing this on the car is because it's very easy and you don't have to have the special tool to push back the caliper piston this way. There we are. Just give it a second. Then I'll take my 10 millimeter. I'm going to tighten it back up turning to the right. There we are. It's all done dripping, perfect. The next thing we're going to do--we're going to take our 14 millimeter wrench or ratchet with a socket, whatever you're using, it's your preference, you do you, boo boo. I'm going to put it on. I'm going to try to loosen this bolt right here and loosen this bolt right there. Once they're both loose I can go ahead and remove them. Remove my caliper out of the way, and that will give us view of our caliper bracket. Here we go.
I'm just going to give it a little bonk. Find my other bolt. Do the same thing. Now these are very loose. I can go ahead and remove them by hand. I am wearing safety on my hands because there's brake fluid here. You could try to wipe it down and make sure it's as clean as possible if you're not wearing gloves. I would recommend gloves, and always safety glasses. There we go. Here's our caliper. There's our piston. This is the muscle. What you want to do is you want to make sure that you don't see any wetness or fluid coming out of there. If you do, your caliper is bad. If your caliper is bad, you can always order one up. This one looks fine, so that's great. We're going to just wipe it down a little bit and we'll rest it aside. You don't want to let it hang anyplace because you could put a tug on your hose. If you do that, you're going to end up buying yourself a new hose. If you have any defective parts on your hose, just replace it. It's high pressure.
I'll set those bolts aside. I'm going to continue with my 14 millimeter wrench. There's two caliper bracket mounting bolts here: one there and one there. These are usually a little bit tighter than the other bolts, so you could try to whack it with your hands and try to loosen it up. You might hurt yourself. I'm going to go with safety. I'm going to use a rubber mallet. Just loosen it up. Easy peasy. Do this one. Get it on there nice and tight. Pretty loose. If you were using a long handle ratchet it might be a little bit easier. There we go. Both those are loose. Now we can go ahead and remove one. Once that one's almost all the way out, we'll leave it in a couple threads, we'll fully remove the second one, and then we can just relieve the last couple threads on the last one and remove it.
Okay this one's pretty much almost all the way loose, so I'll just leave it in a couple threads like I said. I'm going to go back down to the bottom. This one I'm going to remove completely. That's what it looks like. I'll grab the second one while I'm holding the bracket so it doesn't fall. Now we've removed our caliper bracket and we have our two bolts. As you can tell they're both the same. You don't have to worry about mixing them up, so that's great. We'll set this aside.
Here's our rotor. This is part of our friction material. Generally speaking, you'll have your pads that will sit inside your caliper bracket. You've got your caliper over those. When you step on your brake it squeezes the muscle, the piston, makes the pads go up against the rotor, causes friction, slows you down. You can check out the condition of your rotor, see how it looks. There's probably a reason why you're replacing it. We'll just go with whatever you're doing it for. I'm going to grab it. Just wiggle it and try to pull it off.
If it doesn't come off for you, maybe it's stuck on there. It could be because your emergency brake shoes are too tight, in which case you just pull this rubber out. If I had my pocket screwdriver I'd do it real quick. You check that and make sure that it's de-adjusted and you can spin this a little bit. Once that's de-adjusted and you know you can spin it and it's still stuck, if you were replacing this rotor you can go ahead and whack it with a hammer. If you weren't replacing the rotor, you'd want to use a couple little bolts right here, one there and one there. You can just drive those in and they'll pull the rotor away from the hub for you.
This is already nice and loose. I got lucky with this one. Now we've removed our rotor and we can go ahead and replace it or clean it up and put it back on. We're going to go ahead and replace it though. We've got our bracket off. We're going to grab our sliders, make sure they move a little bit. This lets us gauge what we're going to have to do. Now we're going to go ahead and we're going to remove these pads. It's going to be very simple. You just grab them, shake them a little bit, one's out. Do the next. Pad number two. Easy peasy. Now we've got our bracket and we're ready to clean this puppy up.
All right, friends, I have another product comparison for you. We have our old parts from our 2013 Subaru Outback. As you can tell they're in practically new condition, maybe not. Over here though we have our quality 1A Auto Parts that are in brand new condition. As you could tell, these are some great parts. They're drilled. They're slotted. This is great for heat and dust dissipation for when you're driving down the road and you're riding the brakes, maybe somebody gets in front of you, you've got to heat them up. You go driving again and the heat's going to dissipate really quick. That's great.
We've got brand new quality parts right here. These are the brake pads. This is part of your friction material. You step on your brake, this gives a little squeeze, and it stops you. We've got brand new rotors and brand new pads. These are cross cut, so basically the cuts go this way and they go that way. They go both ways, so that's great. Sometimes you'll get rotors and they'll just be cut one way and that can get a little bit messy over time. This is great. Quality part right here.
If you wanted to match them up, which is always a good thing to do, you could take your new one, rest it right on top of your old one. We know our diameter is the same, so that's great. Always good. You want to make sure that the hat is sitting at the same level. We would have it off of whatever this pad is, but basically you just kind of match it up like that. You can tell that it's sitting exactly level the way that it's supposed to be. It's cut to the exact manufacturer's specifications in exception of just the fact that well it's a little better. Here we go. Let's go ahead and install this on our car. If you need these or any other quality parts, you can always check us out at 1aatuo.com. Thanks.
We've got our caliper bracket right here. We already checked to make sure that the sliders are in working condition, so that's always nice, but what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to pull them out and we're going to need to clean them. All I'm going to do is I'm going to grab it like this and pull it right out. This is the slider shaft. This comes through and it goes into here. If this is all rusted up, or if it seems like it has water in it or anything like that, what you're going to have is a sticky caliper slider. You're going to grab it. It's not going to move. Then your caliper is not going to be able to squeeze and release as it should. You're going to have overheated brakes, brake pulsations down the line, premature wear on your pads, even slanted wear on your pads.
What I like to do any time I'm doing a brake job, and you should always do it, and I highly recommend it, you remove them. Take the boot right off. Set it aside. Same thing for the other one. Boot off. Set it aside. While I've got this out, I'm going to show you. We'll just clean it. This is something to pay attention to. This one has a little boot on it. This one does not. Wipe it off for you. Okay. You don't want to mix these up. This is important. Subaru put them the way that they wanted them for anti-vibration dampening and everything like that, so we're going to make sure we put everything right back the way we took it apart. That's why we're here. We're here to do a good quality job. We want it done right the first time so we don't have it to take it back apart, go back on 1aauto.com, order more parts because we did it wrong. Len's showing you how to do it.
Let's move along. I'm going to grab this little pocket screwdriver. I'm just going to try to weasel it in under here. All I want to do is remove that tin. I'll put it aside. I'm going to do the same thing to the other tin. Just get under here. Take a peek at them. They both look the same. Which ones which--doesn't really matter. Now we've got our brake caliper bracket. It's a little dirty and a little nasty. We're going to take some of our parts cleaner. You can use whatever you've got for parts cleaner. There's no real recommendation on what to use.
Wearing hand protection, eye protection always. This is a solvent. It's going to spray in and it's going to force other stuff out. If you spray something and it comes up in your face, well we're going to have an issue. You don't want to go blind. I want to see my kids. I want to see my kids' kids some day. I'm just going to spray it in nice and light. Just like that. Just a little bit. We don't need to go too crazy. Then I'm going to take something like this that's just a bore brush. You don't have to have it on a power drill if you don't have access to one. You could just use the brush if you have that. But basically what I'm trying to get at is we're going to use this bore brush, go inside the bore of where the slider goes, and we're going to make sure that it's nice and clean in there. We don't want any dirt, or gunk, or muck, or water, rust, anything.
I let the parts cleaner work its magic in there a little bit. I'm just going to stick it in. I'll let this go for a minute. Obviously not a full minute. I mean we don't need to be ridiculous about it. I'm going to do this one. I've got my recycling receptacle here. This is where I'm going to collect all my fluid so I can dispose of it properly. I'm going to tip it. All right. I'm aiming this away from my face. I don't have anything aiming near my face when I'm doing this. As stuff goes in stuff's also going to come out. There we are. Do this one. Whoops. Okay. Wipe it down.
I'm going to move that out of my face so I'm not breathing in any vapor that I don't need to. Now we can look inside here. We're going to notice that it's nice and clean in there. If you happen to see that it's very rusted, maybe one of your caliper slider pins was frozen in there and it was rusted in, you had an issue getting it out, you might need to go a little bit longer with that bore brush. If it looks good, which this one doesn't look too bad, I might actually just spray it a little bit more with the cleaner. It looks like it's just got a little bit of the grease in there still, but it looks like it's good to go otherwise.
Next you want to look along here. All along here there's a ridge. This is where that boot rides. If you have any chunks of stuff there, it's going to cause an issue. We'll just go ahead and we'll just clean it off. You can use a pocket screwdriver. If you have a little wire brush. You can go with something like this. I have a nice small handle on mine. Makes it easier to grab onto for me. Just go around. Looks okay. That looks good. Just wipe it out again. Now we can move on to the next step. I'm going to set this aside. Move this stuff out of my way.
Let's do the bracket tins next. As you could tell, these are pretty nasty. They got a lot of gunk on there. They're going to make a mess. What I like to do is clean them down. Why not--we're here. I'm just going to use my wire brush. It's practically new. Go like this. If you're doing this for a while and it doesn't seem like it's ever going to come clean, you don't have to worry your pretty little head about it. Just as long as you get the majority of the big chunks off. Anything that might be sitting underneath there that might cause a raise between this and the bracket itself is going to cause issues down the line. You might have your pad stuck in the bracket, which is going to cause overheating like I said.
I don't need to get into the rest of that, you've already heard it, but you just want to make sure that generally speaking it's clean. If it looks like it's discolored, it's really not a big deal. Nobody's going to see this stuff except for everybody on YouTube when I do it. Here we go. It's looking pretty good. Let's take a look. What do you think? Which one do you want to use? Let's go with this one, but we'll do the same to this one because we're going to use them both realistically. We cleaned up both tins now. We're doing all right aren't we? Got both sides clean. This is the especially important side, the back side. This is where it's going to ride on the bracket. Those look good. We can set them aside.
Now let's go ahead and clean up our caliper pins a little bit better. This is very important to make sure that they're clean of debris. If for some reason water did get in there and they're very rusted, you're going to want to make sure that the surfaces are smooth where they ride inside the caliper bracket. That looks pretty decent. Something that you'll want to take note of is right in here. This is the important part. This has to be super clean because I'll show you why. When you have your boot on there, the boot itself is going to ride in here. If this is all gunked up and it has large chunks of anything, it's going to create an area where water seeps in. Water seeps in, comes up in here, what's it going to do to metal, everybody knows, it's going to rust it, it's going to rot it, amd it's going to seize these up. You just wasted all this time cleaning and doing a brake job.
We'll just take our time. We'll clean it up. Some people might say you don't need to worry so much, Len. You do things overkill. I'd rather do it once and do it right than do it twice. Might as well while I'm here. Once we get this one cleaned we're going to do the same thing to the other one. We'll get them nice and clean. Then we're going to move on to cleaning out the inside of those boots. That's also important.
All right, now we're going to clean our boot. We're just going to go ahead and put a little bit of parts cleaner in there. We don't need to put too much. We can go ahead and use our bore brush again if we want, or we can just go ahead and put a rag through. I'm just going to bring it through like that, get it going through. Put that in the receptacle. I'm just going to go ahead and squeeze the rubber around. Roll it, roll it, roll it. Do whatever I need to do. I'm just going to pull it off just like that. As you can see inside, it looks pretty clean. If you wanted to go a little bit more, you could. I'll take a look. I'd say that looks pretty great, especially in a comparison from where it came. We're going to do the same thing to the other one and then we'll move along.
To get back to the bracket, we want to clean up inside here. This is where those nice tins that we just shined up nice and beautiful sit. When you start chiseling away at it, you can see all the gunk that starts coming up. I could sit here all day with this little pocket screwdriver and do it, but first what I'd rather do is use my little brush. I'm going to get off the majority of all the crud that's on there so I can get a better view of what I'm actually going to need to start chiseling off with that small screwdriver. I'll just use my little brush. Just a basic wire brush. It's nothing special. I know you're thinking "wow Len makes this look easy. It must be a special brush." No. Looks pretty good. Just give it a little chisel. Feels fine. I don't feel anything that's coming up, bumping up. Feels okay. We'll do the other side, same exact thing.
Okay, everybody. I just spent a little bit of time. I cleaned up these areas where the tins are going to ride. These are clean. They're just going to be fitting right in here. Before I go ahead and put it on there though, I want to make sure I have some form of water resistance, something that's going to sit in between there and it's going to keep water from getting in there and making moisture buildup, rust, anything that's going to cause swelling, make my brake pads stick in there. We all know why, already talked about it.
I'm just going to use a little bit of brake caliper lube. It's naturally black. It's not just that dirty. It's what we use. You can use something like silicone paste. I wouldn't recommend something as thin as maybe Vaseline. You go with that, what's going to happen is it's going to heat up with the brakes, because brakes get hot, it's going to liquefy, and then it's going to get all over stuff that you don't want it to, like your friction materials, all the stuff that we're actually replacing here. I put on a decent amount. I didn't go too crazy with it. I'll just get off the extra that I just put on there. I don't need to go here. I don't need to go up there. I don't need to go anywhere else besides just where the tins are for now.
Now that I've got that done I'll grab my tins. I'm just going to place them in and give them a little squeeze. They should sit in there fairly easily. There's these little tabs right there. Those go up inside here. I'm going to grab it. I'm just going to slide it in. Make sure the tab's up in there. That's what's going to really hold it. That looks pretty decent. We don't need to put any brake caliper lube inside here where the brake pad's actually going to ride. The reason for that is because it's going to collect a lot of brake dust and gunk and road debris, and that's just going to clog things up and it's going to make a big mess, and you'll have more chances of this stuff, the brake lube I mean, getting inside and getting on your pads and your rotor causing a big mess. Let's just avoid that altogether.
Now that we've completed this part, we're going to go ahead with the slider part. We're going to take our slider. We didn't mix these up right. We know that this one goes over in this one, this one goes over here. I cleaned them up, but I just put them right back where I got them from. I'm going to take a little bit more of my brake caliper lube. I'm just going to put it on there. You can go pretty liberal with this now at this point. You don't need to skimp on it. It's not that expensive. I know money's tight, that's okay, but we want to make sure that in case any water did somehow get in there it has no chance of getting into that metal and rusting things up.
Something else to mention, when I was lubing, I also put the lube all the way up into here, which is the groove. That groove up there is where this is going to ride. This is the boot. It's going to help keep the water out. I'm just going to go up and in now. I'm going to push that up. Then I'm going to give the boot a little twist, make sure that I have that caliper lube all around inside that groove. Water's not going to get past that. Good job.
Maybe I'll put a little bit more. Something to remember is you don't need to put a whole stack of it out to here on the end. If for some reason you just want to, I don't know, cake it out there, leaning tower of Pisa, whatever, you don't need too much on the end there. What will happen is you'll put your slider pin in, it will be sitting down in here, your caliper slider pin won't be able to go in as far as it needs to. The caliper won't be able to function like it should. You don't need to go too crazy with that part.
The boot's coming in now. It's getting all the way up against there. What happens if we don't get any lube inside this groove right here? Well we're going to be stuck in the same position if we didn't get lube up in there. If you wanted to, you can grab more, or you could just use your little pocket screwdriver. Just grab some that's already hanging out in there. Put it up in that groove. Squish it. Twist, twist, twist. Water's not getting in there. This is going to be good for a long long time. We're going to do the same thing to the other slider and then we'll continue.
The next thing we're going to do is we're going to clean up this bearing hub assembly. Right along here is where your new rotor is going to sit, so you want to make sure that you have that as clean as possible. You use something like a parts cleaner. Make sure that whatever comes off of this goes into a recycling receptacle. Then we're going to use something as simple as a wire brush and just woo, just like that. We'll get it all cleaned up so there's no extra things sticking up all over the place. Once it's clean, we'll be good to go. For this particular bearing we're just going to go ahead and replace it though.
Here we go. I've got my copper never seize. I'm just going to try to get it around here, but not on the axle shaft itself. Obviously not too much on the braking surface of the shoes either. While we've been working maybe we've been touching the shoes a little bit with our greasy oily hands. You could try to clean them up. If these are old shoes and you notice that they're really shiny or oily, take a piece of sand paper, scuff them up, give them a nice clean surface again. Looks pretty decent. Yeah they're a little shiny, but all this is is the emergency brake okay. It's your parking brake. Once this goes out, it's pretty much just holding your rotor nice and tight. You don't have to worry about too much friction like you're driving and you're using your brakes off and on. You don't drive using your emergency brake to stop generally speaking. Maybe you do. I don't, but anyway.
Moving along. We've got our rotor. We're going to try to slip it on. Just like that. Give it a little spin. All right. It doesn't sound like it's connecting with the shoes, so let's go ahead and adjust it. Remember we wanted to turn that star upward to adjust the shoes out. Right now the shoes are pretty much riding right along here inside there. We'll imagine them. As I adjust it they're going, trying to come out. They're going to try to touch up against this rotor. Uh oh, too far, Len. See? What if I left it like this now? We're going to try to drive, that's not going to move.
Here we go. Now I'm going to go the other way. I'm just going to turn it down. Turn down for what, because I want to get rid of that noise. I got a little bit of scrape, not too bad. Let's try going back again. Now it's got drag again, so we know that we were pretty much in the right spot that last one. Let's go back two. Come on. One more. There it is. Perfect. Okay. Inside our old Subaru rotor there should be a little plug that's going to go right here. You want to make sure you put that back in. That's going to keep your debris, dirt, water, gunk, I don't know, whatever's under there that's going to get in here. We want to make sure that's sealed up.
If you don't have that boot still, maybe you lost it, maybe the last person that did it lost it, you need to make sure you fill this in with something. You can use a little bit of black RTV, or whatever you might have, but you need to make sure that whatever it is isn't going to go bloop into there and then cause an issue in between the shoes and the rotor that we just installed everything. If you put in a rubber and it goes bloop, falls in there and you're like aw, meh. Well what's going to happen? You just imagine it. I don't need to explain it to you.
Here we go. I'm going to grab that little boot. Looks like this right here. I'm pushing from the back side. There it is. I'm going to put it in. Looks pretty good. Imagine you're pushing it in now though. No, I'm not going to do it. I don't want to do it. But imagine you were pushing it in and the thing went bloop, fell right in there. What are we going to do? We're going to find that rubber boot and do it again. Okay, very simple. There we go.
We've got our cleaned and prepped caliper bracket here. We've got our two caliper bracket bolts. I put on a little bit of thread locker. It's your prerogative. We're going to start both these bolts before we tighten either of them down. It's just a 14 millimeter head, so I'll grab that real quick. All I'm going to do now is I'm going to bottom it out and then we're going to make sure we torque it down. Here we go friends. I'm going to torque these up. It's 48.7 foot-pounds. My torque wrench doesn't do points, so I'm going to go 49. Hopefully Subaru won't get mad at me for overdoing it. There we go. I'll just do them both one more time just for good measure. You don't have to. There we are. We'll go ahead and put on the pads and then the caliper. Then we'll put those bolts in and torque those down as well.
A good thing to do is to just go ahead and put on a little bit of silicone paste on the caliper, or the muscle of the brake. This is going to help with vibration dampening, noise reduction. Every time you brake it's going to help reduce noise inside the car. Next we're going to put on our pads. We've got our squealer side. This is the, basically you can tell. I call it a squealer because once the brakes get down to where that is going to meet up with the rotor, it's going to start making noise. That will tell you that it's time to replace your brakes again. So you can watch this video again and I'll show you how to do it again.
Here we go. I'm going to put the one with the squealer on the back side. I'm going to put the other pad on the outside. If you had to hammer them in, or try to really squeeze and try to finagle them in, it was an issue, odds are you didn't clean up the bracket well enough. That's okay. Just take it back apart and give it a little bit more. It's no big deal. I'm not going to get mad at you. It's your car. Anyway. Now we've got our caliper on to where our pads are. We've got our two caliper mounting screws. These mount the caliper to the caliper bracket. Go ahead and snug these down.
Now I'm trying to snug these up and bottom them out. I'm noticing that my caliper slider is spinning. That's okay. I'm not worried about it. I'll just grab it with my pliers. I'll get them to the right size first of course. That will be helpful. There we are. I'm going to go ahead and torque these down. Just make sure that they're both bottomed out. I've got my torque wrench set to 20 foot-pounds with my 14 millimeter socket on there. There we are. Get this on here. Those are both tight.
Now we'll just take a peek at everything we've got together. We made sure we tightened everything up. Everything's torqued. Looks pretty great. We've got our bleeder screw right here. We can go ahead and get our recycling receptacle underneath there, or our hose, whatever we have. We're going to open this back up and we're going to wait for a strong trickle of fluid to come out. But while it's closed what we can do is we can pump up the brake pedal, make sure that that piston's fully extended and pushing the pads up against the rotor first. Then we'll go ahead and open it up.
Here we go. I'm just going to pump up the brake pedal. Get it nice and firm. Feels pretty good. All right, now we can go back out there and we'll pop open those bleeder screws. Okay, friends, I've got my recycling receptacle. I'm just going to place it on the ground and take my 10 millimeter and turn this to the left. I'm going to watch right here for any air to come out. It's pretty probable you might get a bubble or two, but you really shouldn't get too much. Just let it run for a second. You want to keep in mind that you don't want to run your master cylinder dry, which is up top under your hood. You don't want to leave this open all night and just expect it to finish running out all the air. Just get it going like that. I don't see any air bubbles coming out. It's been a good, I don't know, 10 seconds or more.
Just tighten that back up to the right. We'll clean this back up. Then we're going to go ahead and use this boot. We'll put that back on and that will keep everything nice and safe from moisture. I got this all sprayed down with my parts cleaner. We're going to take our boot, like I said, we're going to put it back on here. That's going to keep moisture and crud from getting in there. There we go.
Time to get the wheel back up on here. We made sure everything is nice and tight. We're ready to lift this. What we want to make sure we do is we don't go ahead and bend down like this and try to lift it up with our back. It's very dangerous. Try to preserve your back. Just take it like this, roll it up your leg. Use your ab muscles to lift it. Hold your wheel on there. Grab one lug nut and start it on. There we go. Now the wheel can't go anywhere. I can release it and start all the others. We'll get them bottomed out and then we'll go ahead and torque them down.
Now it's time to get this torqued down. I've got the majority of the weight of the vehicle off of the wheel, but I do have the wheel just barely on the ground enough to make sure that the tire doesn't spin while I'm torquing. I'm going to go to 88 foot-pounds with my 19 millimeter socket. I'm going to go in a star pattern. Now I'm just going to go around again for good measure. There we go.
Our last step is to make sure we top off our brake fluid. We're going to double check we have the right brake fluid, which is DOT 3 on this particular vehicle. I have DOT 3 brake fluid. That's great. You definitely don't want to add DOT 5 if it's supposed to be DOT 3. You use DOT 3. DOT 3 is hygroscopic. DOT 5 is hydrophobic. Hygroscopic means it would absorb moisture. Hydrophobic means it would basically push it away. DOT 5 is also a silicone based, so it will basically separate from the type of fluid that's in here and it will cause issues. To sum it up, just use what's recommended. It will be what's best for your vehicle. Engineers at Subaru knew what they wanted to use. Now we'll close up both of our containers and we'll take it for a test drive.
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Tools used
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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly: that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.
In this video, I'm going to inspect and then show you how to replace the front rotors and pads on this '99 Subaru Legacy same as '96 to '99. It turns out that this vehicle, the brakes are actually in fine shape so I just removed them and put them back on to show you the process. Obviously, I only do one side whenever you do brakes, you always replace them in pairs. The tools you'll need for the job are jack and jack stands. 14, 17, and 19 millimeters sockets with a ratchet and an extension. You'll need a breaker bar or a piece of pipe to use with your ratchet because some of the bolts or a couple of bolts can be a little difficult, and you'll need a wire brush and a large C-clamp.
Okay, start by removing one of the front tires. I'm using impact tools. If you have just regular hand tools, you're going to want to lose lug nuts with the wheel in the ground and jack up and secure the vehicle. Take the lug nuts the rest away off and remove the tire. Either grab the rotor and turn it or turn your steering wheel.
With our wheel off, we can inspect the brakes. One thing you want to look at is the condition of the rotors and what we'll do is take the back of your finger nail, just kind of run it on the surface. You'll feel small grooves but you want to watch out for any deep gauges or anything. Then you can also kind of check the back side as well. It feels very good on this car. Inside here you can see ... let me spin this a little bit. There's the rotor. Just to the left of where it's spinning, that's the inner pad so you can see there's quite a bit of life left on that. Then the outer pad, you can see out here and then there's good life on that. The brakes on this vehicle are in good shape. The only exception would be is, if when you drove it, it vibrated or pulsated, then you might want to do some work, replace the rotors or maybe even just replace the whole rotors and pads but these are working fine. I'm just going to do an inspection and I'll show you how to take all part and put them back together.
The next step you're going to want to do is to remove the caliper and you do that by removing a bolt here, a bolt here. These bolts are 14 millimeters. They should come apart relatively easily. Fast forward here as I remove those two bolts. You want to remove those bolts and you might . there's little boots here that you'll see. You might want to slide those in some and then you should just pull your caliper right off and we can flip that up here for right now. Okay so, here are your pads. They just are in the retainers, so they'll just slide right out. Okay and the inner one will slide out too as well. Okay, now this bracket here is your caliber bracket and you'll need to remove that if you want to replace your rotor. Before we do that, just one thing to check is these slides here. They will pull out. Let's see if we can pull the plug just like that.
You want to make sure that they're nice and free and if they're not, take them out. Wire brush them. Put some grease back on them and replace them. Mine are working fine. Let's push it back in. Another thing: many pads come with new retainers here. Use the new ones. If the pads you buy don't have new retainers, you can pull these out. Use a wire brush, clean them up. Remove these caliper brackets so we can get the rotor off. There are two 17 millimeter bolts from there and one here. Before I do those bolts, just looking at here I can see some pretty good corrosion here. I'm just going to throw a little bit of penetrating oil. Hopefully that will do. Okay, for these bolts, I use the extension because there's kind of the, strut gets in the way a little bit. Let me make sure that I've got the socket on there well. Use a piece of pipe, giving you this extra leverage.
I'll fast forward as I remove both those 17 millimeter bolts. If you have a breaker bar, that's great. That's the right tool but if you have a ratchet or a smaller ratchet, just use a piece of pipe like that. It gives you the extra leverage and these bolts sometimes can be a little bit of a challenge to get out. Once these bolts are out, you can take that bracket off, and then, work the rotor off.
Here's the installation. Put the rotor back on. You want to put your caliper between the rotor and the steering knuckle and then put the bolt through. Just kind of move it around a little until the bolt starts in and another one, the same thing. You might find still this part takes a little bit convincing to get through there.
I'll just fast forward. I'm just using my ratchet and socket to preliminarily tighten those bolts. Next stop is, I'll use a torque wrench. Now, you want to torque these to 85 foot-pounds. As your brakes wear, the pistons in your caliper may come out and that's how they adjust so before you put your new pads in, you'll need to push your caliper pistons back in. What you do is take your old pad and put it right in. Let's take a nice big C-clamp.
I didn't do a very good job of talking while I was doing that but you use that C-clamp and the pad and you tighten the C clamp and it forces the pistons back into the caliper.
Now, I'll put the pads back in. This is your inner pad which has a wear tab. You want to have that at the bottom. Then, put the pad back in there and back on there. Do the same thing for the outer pad. You can see I cleaned out the slides so put that down there. Sometimes you're going to have to take your pad, slide it in. Make sure it's all in place correctly. Put our caliper down on. Start one bolt in. Torque these to 20 foot-pounds.
Pick up the pace here. Straighten out the steering knuckle and put the tire on, thread, the lug nuts on by hand first. Okay here, I'm just preliminary tightening the lug nuts with my impact wrench. Now with the car in ground I'll torque the lug nuts to 100 foot-pounds using a star pattern. Most important of all, make sure you pump your brakes a bunch of times. Make sure the brake pedal is nice and firm before you road test then do a stop from 5 miles an hour and 10 miles an hour when you take the car out on the road.
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Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!
In this video, we'll be replacing the front brakes on a 2015 Subaru Forester. If you need these parts or other parts for your vehicle, click the link in the description and head over to 1aauto.com.
I'm going to take this tire off. Before I lift it up off the ground, I'm going to break the lug nuts free. I'm going to use a 19mm socket and a breaker bar. Just break them loose. All right, with the tire up in the air, then I can take the tire off.
Okay, now I'm going to take these two caliper bolts off. I'm going to use a 14mm wrench. Before I loosen this one up all the way, I'll loosen the top one just like that. Take these bolts out. All right, so we're going to pull this caliper off. I can take a flat blade screwdriver and just pry in here a little bit. I'm going to pull out to compress the piston a little, and then we can pull the caliper off just like that.
I'm going to use a bungee cord to hold it up. Go through the caliper hole and then over here. That'll keep the pressure off the brake line. We'll just set that out of the way. All right, now we're going to take out the pads. Sometimes you need a screwdriver to pry them out a little bit. Pull that pad out. Then we'll pull the inboard pad out.
Next we're going to take these caliper bracket bolts out. They're 17mm. So I'm going to use a 17mm socket and a ratchet. We'll take these out. For the top one, I had to use a wrench because the socket would not fit in this area because it was hitting the strut bolt. All right, so we'll take the bottom bolt out. This would be easier if you had a ratchet wrench to get the top one out because you'd fit it in there better. Pull that bolt out. Okay, and pull the bottom one out. Now we can pull the bracket right off the rotor.
So to get the rotor separated from the hub, what we can do is we can take a hammer and hit right around in these areas. We actually sell this hammer at 1aauto.com. But in addition to that, there's these two little screw holes that you can thread some bolts. You'll have to find some bolts that fit. Whoops. So we'll thread this bolt here and thread this bolt here. I'll take a ratchet. I'm just going to snug these up a little bit. I'm not going to put too much pressure on them. Just wait till it gets snug, just put a little bit of pressure on, and then we'll do this the same to this one. And then I can just take my hammer and give it a tap. If I have to, I can tighten this up some more, and it's pulling the rotor right up just like that, and then the rotor comes off. All right.
We're going to clean this caliper bracket up. You can take a wire brush and just go like this. Clean up the pad slides. You can use a smaller wire brush to get in there a little better. Get some of the rust and corrosion out of here. We can take this pad slide off. Use a screwdriver. Get underneath there and pull that off. There's a little bit of rust and corrosion under here. Just take the wire brush and clean this area.
Take the smaller wire brush and get right in there. On the back of the pad guide, we can just clean this a little bit. This isn't that bad, so just wipe it a little bit. Just get a little of the rust off. We can reinstall this, and then do the same for the other side.
We're going to pull these caliper guide pins out. Pull that out. We're going to spray it down with a little brake parts cleaner. And use a rag and wipe it down. Then before we put it back, we're going to spray some brake parts cleaner into the caliper bracket. Clean this out a little bit. Drain that out. Then we're going to take some caliper grease, brake caliper grease, put it on the pin, and then we can put the pin back in. Make sure the boot goes over the pin just like that, and we'll do the same for the other side. All right.
So before we put our rotor on, we're going to want to take a wire brush or some sandpaper and clean this hub surface up. There's a lot of rust and corrosion on here. Take a smaller wire brush and get in here. All right, I'm just going to install the rotor backwards for a second because I'm going to spray the back side of the rotor with some brake parts cleaner and wipe it down with a rag.
There's a coating on the rotors, so that it does not corrode while it's sitting on the shelf. So now we'll flip it around. Now we'll spray this side of the rotor and wipe it down. Next we can install our caliper bracket and slide it over the rotor. And then with our bolts, we're going to slide them in the back side. We're going to torque these caliper bracket bolts. I'm going to use a 17mm socket and an extension with a torque wrench. We sell this torque wrench at 1aauto.com.
The reason for the extension is I can't get in there because of the strut bolts. And we're going to torque these to 59 ft-lbs. So that's good. For the bottom one, I'll take the extension off. And they're good. All right, so we're going to take a little bit of brake grease, and put it on the ends of these brake pads and on the side. This side, and the same on this side, and on there. Do not get the grease on the pad friction material.
All right, so we'll start with the outside. Put this one down. All right, so this little tab is going to come out a little bit. That's going to ride right along here, so we'll push that right there, and then it's just going to slide in there right like that. So that pushes on the outside.
Now we'll take our bungee cord off the caliper and set that aside. Take our caliper and flip it upside down here. A little bit of rust in there. Shake that out. So I'll take one of the old brake pads and slip it right here. Then I can use a caliper compressing tool. You can buy these at 1aauto.com. This is only a single piston caliper tool, but if you use the brake pad, we can alternate back and forth to get it to go down. Just slowly compress the caliper. You could also use some channellock pliers or a C-clamp to get these to compress.
All right, now the caliper's compressed all the way. Pull this brake pad off. Make sure that the hose is not twisted the wrong way, and you can slide the caliper back onto the bracket. Now we can reinstall the caliper bolts—the bottom one and the top one. All right, I'm going to use some small locking pliers to prevent the caliper guide pin from spinning, and I'm going to use a 14 mm socket and a torque wrench, and I'm going to torque these bolts to 20 ft-lbs. I'll do the same for the bottom. Use some locking pliers and this guide pin.
Then we're going to put the tire up. Put the lug nuts on. We'll just snug these up by hand before I lower the vehicle. All right, so I'm going to use a 19mm socket and a torque wrench. We're going to torque these lugs down to 89 ft-lbs, and I'm going to do it in a star pattern so that the wheel gets torqued down evenly. All right, before we take the vehicle and take it for a ride, we're going to want to pump the brake pedal, because what's happening is there's an air gap between the brake caliper piston and the brake pad, so when we pump the pedal, that's pushing fluid back down to the calipers and getting rid of that air gap. And the brake pedal, once the brake pedal feels good, then you're good to go.
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