2008 Subaru Legacy 2.5i Rear Ceramic Brake Pads TRQ BFA73153

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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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.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.

Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

Using a 19 millimeter deep socket and a breaker bar, I'll loosen the lug nuts with the vehicle on the ground. I'll raise and support the vehicle. With the lug nuts loose, I'm going to use the socket and finish removing them. This wheel is nice and loose. I'll take it off and put it aside.

I'm going to take a flat bladed screwdriver and just wedge it in here, and then pull the caliper to the outside. This will compress the piston inside. It'll make it easier to pull it off just like that. You can see the piston. That actually moves really nicely on the slides so I know it's not seized and the piston went in there nice and smooth. This caliper's in good shape.

Now to remove the caliper's slide pin bolts, there's a bottom on and a top one, 14 millimeter. We're going to start with the top on. Spin it out. We'll do the same for the bottom one. We'll take our caliper off, and I'm just going to rest it on top of the suspension arm here. Just going to pop our pads out of the caliper bracket using a flat bladed screwdriver in here. Do the same for the other one.

I'm going to take a mallet here and just kind of wedge it in between them because I'm not reusing these. So those pads are really stuck in there. They should have a little bit more grease on the ends so they slide better. Now to remove the caliper bracket bolts, there's a bottom and a top on. I'm going to start with the top one. These are 14 millimeter. If they're really stiff, you can use a dead blow mallet. Just hit on it. Break them free. I'm going to switch to a ratcheting wrench to make this a little quicker. Do the top one the same way. I'm going to hold the bracket so it doesn't fall. Take the bracket out.

So you should have the parking brake off before you try this to get the rotor off because the parking brake assembly is inside of here with brake shoes and a rust ridge will sometimes build up on the inside, preventing you from just easily pulling this rotor off. I'm going to pop this rubber cap out with a flat bladed screwdriver. That's okay. If it pops inside, that's fine. You'll just get it when we pull the rotor off.

We need to find the adjuster, which is right there at the bottom. There's a star wheel adjuster just below that spring. We're going to turn it and release the tension so that this brake rotor will come off easier. So use a flat bladed screwdriver to push it in towards the car and you'll actually feel this rotor will get looser because it's pulling the brake shoes in away from the inside of the hub, inside of the hat here. I'm going to spray some rust penetrant around the hub here and inside these threaded holes. Just try to break the seal.

The rotor might be rusted to the hub a bit. Let's see if it's going to break free. I'm going to tap it with a dead blow mallet around it. It's a little loose. We're going to take some metric bolts. These are 8 by 1.0 thread pitch. I'm going to thread them in, and I'm going to use them to push the rotor off. I'm just going to use the appropriately sized socket for the bolts. I'll just turn it off.

You can start to see it's pushing it off. You just kind of go evenly back and forth. Sometimes, it's a lot easier than hitting it a bunch of times with a hammer. That's nice and loose now. You can actually pull that right off. Here we go and inside, you can see the parking brake assembly. It just drops a little rubber plug that I pushed inside there. Save that. We're going to reuse it.

Now just pushing in, it goes inside of the car in this adjuster wheel. It's pulling the adjuster in, which in turn, pulls the parking brake shoes in and it releases them from that outer rotor hat. On the inside, you can see where their brake shoes for the parking brake were riding, and then the rust ridge that builds over time and that rust ridge can make it hard to pull this rotor off unless you compress or retract those parking brake shoes in.

I took out the caliper slides by just pulling them in and out. Those are working nicely. They don't need to be cleaned or lubricated. Then reuse the hardware. It's stainless. You're just going to clean it with brake parts cleaner and a wire brush. You do that to the other side.

Now would be a good time to inspect your parking brake hardware. This all looks in good shape. It's not a very old car. Just going to take some brake parts cleaner and spray this down. All right, just going to spray the inside of the brake rotors with brake parts cleaner. Make sure it's nice and clean. I'll install it. I'm going to adjust the parking brake, turn it so I can see that star wheel again. Before, I was going under the spring to loosen it.

Now I'm going to go above the spring just a few turns to bring it out. It's hard to tell how far it's dragging because you're getting the resistance from the differential. So I just want to bring it out a little bit and then afterwards, we're going to go inside the car, pull it out a little bit more and we're going to pull up on the parking brake handle and it will self-adjust the brake shoes out to meet the new rotor. Don't forget. Reinstall that little rubber plug that keeps weather out of there. It just pushes back in.

We're going to put some copper anti-seize on the caliper mounting bolts. I'll install the caliper bracket—get the top one started. Might have to move the bracket around. Get that threaded in. Get the bottom on threaded in. Use the ratcheting wrench and just tighten these down. Get them snug and then we'll do a quarter turn more. Here's out original pad for our vehicle and a brand new one from 1AAuto.com.

So you can see here, this is worn to 6 millimeter and brand new pad has 8 millimeter. It's not really that worn. But we're going to show you how to replace it anyways. Using the same design, the inside pad will have the wear indicator. This is an outside pad. This will work great and fit great in your vehicle.

Just going to give the brake pads a quick clean with some brake parts cleaner. Don't have to soak them. Get rid of any dirty or grease. Take a little caliper grease and we'll put it on the ears. This one will go on the inside. Line it up. Push it in place and the same for the outside pad.

We need to push our piston back into the caliper so it can fit over the new brake pads. Put an old brake pad over it. Put a C-clamp in there and just kind of gently turn it and press the piston into the caliper. That should do it.

Reinstall the caliper and we'll put the slide pin bolts in. Same with the other one. We'll tighten these up just like that. If while you're tightening this, the slide pin bolt starts to spin, you can counterhold it with an adjustable wrench. Just get it situated in there and then tighten it. This one didn't spin on me so I didn't have to do that. We're going to do the same for the bottom one. Just tighten it. Once it gets tight, just stop. You don't want to break them. The copper's moving nicely. I haven't sprayed the face of this brake rotor yet. If you get this caliper on and you forget to do it, no big deal. You can spray it right now as it is. You can just turn it. It's all set.

Put the wheel and tire back on. Hold it up. Get the lug nuts started by hand. You're going to use the socket. Thread these all down. I'm going to lower the vehicle. I'll torque them. I'm going to torque the lug nuts to 89 foot-pounds in a cross pattern.

Now we need to gently pump the brakes to move the pistons out to meet the pads. I'm not going to press it all the way to the floor. Press it about a quarter of the way. Build it up. It'll start to get harder. That's perfect. Now the brake job is done.

At the rear, we want to adjust those parking brake shoes. You're going to hold the button and just pull it up. It'll start to get tighter. We'll see if it latches. A couple more times. It'll start to grab sooner and just do it until you feel it get tighter, lower. That's good there.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.