2003 Subaru Impreza WRX To 7/31/02 Production Date Front Ceramic Brake Pad & Rotor Kit TRQ BKA11988

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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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