2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser Front Ceramic Brake Pad & Rotor Kit TRQ BKA10599

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser. I'm going to be doing a front brake job. It's going to be very easy, and I want to show you how to do it. If you need these or any other parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com.

Okay, so what we're going to do first is we're going to take off these six lug nuts, 21 millimeter. You can use a ratchet and a socket if you want, or your air gun. There we are. Get the wheel broken free, drop this down, wheel it out of the way. Okay, so now we're just going to try to push back the caliper a little bit. I'm just going to go like this. Just try to push back these pistons best I can. This is just to release the pads from the rotor. Cool, okay. Rotor can move around freely. If we need to, we can push them back a little further in a minute.

Now we're going to remove the caliper. One of the first things we need to do is take off this clip right here. Generally cutters work pretty good for this to grab onto it. Grab some in a second here. Here we are. Now this line can move around. It's very important, so when you take your caliper off, it can move around a little bit. I'm going to use a 12 millimeter up here on this bolt, that's going to remove this bracket so it can move around. Get the socket off of there. There we are. Okay. The bracket can move around freely.

I'm going to take these off right here. If it's easier and you wanted to, you could take off the outer tie rod end. I'm probably going to do that. That way there I can turn this and I can get to those bolts easier. Just grab some cutters. There we are. Just wiggle this around. If you have a new a cotter pin, you don't have to worry about saving this one, but if you don't, you're going to have to try to save it. We do have new ones, so I'm not super worried about it. This one doesn't look like it's coming out, so I'm just going to cut that off of there. Tie rod end nut is a 19 millimeter. There we are, took that off of there. 19 millimeter. I'm just going to give the knuckle a couple of bonks. I want to be careful not to damage the threads on the tire rod or hit the boot. Super important you don't break your boot open. If you do, you'll have to replace the outer tire rod end. All right, round this way. There we are.

Now when we go to install this, we're going to have to make sure that we get that cotter pin out of there. Okay. So we want to put a new one in there. We'll set this aside. Now we can pivot this and we can do what we need to do. We're going to use a 17 millimeter to remove the two bolts for the caliper to the knuckle. Same thing to the other one. At this point, the caliper may come down. You want to make sure you hold onto it so it doesn't fall down and hang too far. Bolt number two. It's the same as the first. Set it aside with the other one. Now I want to hang the caliper. Not by its flex hose obviously. So just grab whenever you've got, coat hanger or something that everybody would have. There you are. We can remove our front rotor. Okay, so now on the brakes, you've got these little clips right here. Just use a pocket screwdriver, try to pull it right out of there.

The way that this one's situated straight up against the bolt here. So that's pretty much what your clip's going to look like. I'm just going to squeeze this back in when it's time to re-install it. I'll show you at that point. Get the other one out right along the backside here. There we are. Clip number two, same as the first. Set it aside. Small hammer. Give these pins a couple of bonks, try to drive them out. That's going to release the pads so the pads may come falling out. So make sure you don't have your face under there or anything like that. Obviously a little bit of penetrant goes a long way with these. Now I'm just going to use a small punch. I'm going to drive these right out. Okay? Do the other one here.

Can grab our clip. My pocket screwdriver. I'm just going to go right along this ear right here. Pull it up. This one, same thing. Might need a small stronger screwdriver than this one to get the pads out. They like to stick in there. Okay. It's definitely in there pretty good. Just drive these pins the rest of the way out here. That's what your pin looks like. There's two of them. They're the exact same. That hole's where the clip went through. I'm just going to use my small hammer. Try to give this a couple of loving bonks. See if it'll come off. A little bit of penetrant. Why not? Okay. Get this out of here. That's what your brake pad looks like. We'll set this aside, do the same to the other one. Brake pad number two.

So now it's time to clean up the hub. This area right here where your rotor goes onto, it's called the hub. You can clean that up with a couple of basic tools. You can either use this, it's available at 1aauto.com. It's great, you get a little sanding desk for it. Clean this up nice. Or you can use something as simple as a wire brush and spend all day cleaning it if you want. There we are. That looks pretty good. Now we'll put on a little bit of copper Never-Seez. Perfect. Grab our rotor and we can move along.

Okay, friends, a quick product comparison for you. Over here we have our front brakes from our 2007 Toyota FJ Cruiser. Just removed them. It was very easy. Over here we have our brand new quality 1A Auto parts. These rotors are cross cut so you can see the etchings. They go in one direction and they also go in the other direction. That's very important for friction. You want to make sure that any rotor that you get is going to be cross cut. Super important. You'll notice along here you have cooling fins right here it looks like it's kind of notched out. The reason for that is because this is called mill balanced. This rotor's already been balanced so you don't have to worry about it being out of balance and causing a brake pulsation driving down the road. We've got our brand new brake pads. They come with our wear indicator. Okay. Same as the old one. Got our wear indicator on there. We'll set these aside.

The rotor hats and everything sit the same height. If we had this turned over, the front side. Right along here is considered the hat. Okay, so essentially by having it this way, you can feel if it's the same. If you're new rotor's up like this or your old rotor's vice versa, you've got an issue, you're going to have an offset in your wheel alignment and everything and there's going to be an issue. You can hold it up like this. We've got six lug holes. That's how many we had removing it. Okay, super important. Lastly, just want to make sure that you have the same rotor diameter along this way. Okay. Same circle. It's the same size and it is. Set this aside. With all that said, I don't see any reason why these wouldn't be quality parts to install into the vehicle, so I'm going to go ahead and do it. If you need these or any other parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com thanks

All right, we've got our rotor, put it right on here. Just going to grab a lug nut and try to put this on as far as I can. I want this to make sure, or this is going to help me make sure that the rotor can't move around on the hub. The more it moves around, the more chances you have of a rust flakes falling in between the rotor and the hub, which will cause a brake pulsation down the line. We'll just kind of give it a little spin like this. I don't hear any brake grinding. The backing plate isn't hitting up against there. It's very common for it to happen. Maybe you were moving something around. You tweaked the backing plate a little bit. This one sounds good.

So now it's always a good idea to use a little bit of caliper grease on your caliper. I like to go right along the edge right here. That's where the edges of your pads are going to ride. So you want to make sure that you don't get a lot of moisture accumulation there. Right up along here, you've got the holes where your caliper slider pins go through. That's where your pad slide. Do the same up on top here. There we are. Just get up on those holes, just grab a little bit more. Okay, now we're just going to do along the pistons. That's going to help with vibration dampening, noise reduction. Here we are. Cool. Carefully put it back over, grab your mounting bolts. If you want to use a little thread locker on these, you can, to your prerogative. For the purpose of this video, I'm not going to worry about it. We're just going to turn these all the way in and then we'll torque them down.

So now we're going to torque down these two bolts to 91 foot-pounds using a 17 millimeter. Just going to turn that. Check them again real quick. Okay. Torqued, torqued tight. We can move along. We've got our pads. Got our little wear indicator. Wear indicator goes on the inside. I'm just going to slide this right in here. Just like that. Do the outer pad, no wear indicator. We've got our two pins, got a clip that goes across and we've got the two clips that hold the pins in at the end. So what we're going to do here, we're going to take our first pin, start bringing it through. Go like that. Put it through the clip again, through the pad and then through the caliper. Just like that. We've got it sticking out right there. Just going to use our little clip. This'll slide through. Make sure it's clipped in so it can't fall out. Okay.

Now you just take these little ears and you put them into the slots in the shoes or pads, slots in the pads. Okay. These little ears right here go over the top and then you have the little prongs, those go into the holes and the pads right there. Take our second one. Do the same thing. This one's a little easier because we don't have a clip. That in there. There we are, cool beans. It looks pretty good. If you wanted to, you can add a little bit more lube to go in between where the pins go into the calipers. You really don't need very much, but it'll help keep them moving if they need to move. So there's that. Get this out of here. Can set our bracket back up with the hole for the bolt and then the hole for the ear on the bracket. I'm just going to go like this, turn it so there's less pressure. That's going to come up here.

A bolt like this, you definitely don't need to use thread locker on. It might actually be better to use a little bit of a, Never-Seez if you have access to some, but I'm not going to worry about it for the purpose of this video. I'm going to use my 12 millimeter, tighten this up. Okay. There's that. Take our line. Try to bring it down so we can see the groove. We're going to use this clip. This is going to go through with the little flippy ear facing our thumb. Just try to bring it in. Sometimes getting these in, it's pretty difficult. I'm just going to loosen this up again real quick, a little bit. Maybe that'll let us get some more movement out of this. Just set up where we need it. As soon as I let go, it goes back. Okay, now I'm just going to bonk that in. Just what I had in my hand. So small hammer would work for this. Okay. Just snug this back up tight. Okay. Tight, tight. All that's tight.

We're going to go ahead and put it on this bleeder screw cover. Easy peasy. I've got this right here. When we took it apart, we had to break the cotter pin, so I'm just going to need to drill that out real quick. Okay, so we got the whole through that. Easy peasy. Now we just clean it off and we can tighten it down and put a brand new cotter pin in there. So now we're just going to take the tie rod end out. We're going to bottom it out and then we'll go ahead and torque it down. Using my 19 millimeter. We'll go with the assumption that it doesn't want to tight down, tighten down. It's just spinning inside the knuckle there. Something you can do if you have access to a long pry bar, just apply upward pressure. Careful of course for your axle, wherever you need to go that you're not pressing on your axle. Just going to keep moving around until I find a nice safe spot. That'll be all right I guess. I'm just going to apply upward pressure. There we are.

Now we're going to go ahead and torque this down and then we're going to have to bring it continually clockwise until we get to the closest slot that lines up with our locking point. Okay. We're going to torque this down to 67 foot-pounds. Okay. That's torqued. Now it's important to pay attention to, like I said before, where the holes are. There's a hole right here, but it kind of lines up with the castle nut. The castle part of the castle nut, so we need to bring it a little further until it lines up. So I'm going to use my ratchet. Just going to go as far as I feel like I need to here. A little bit more. There we are.

Slide that right through. It's your prerogative how you want to set this. Some people go side to side, one ear to one side, one ear to the other side. Some people go over the top. As long as it's bent and it can't come out on its own, you're doing all right. So you do you booboo. Get that on there, that cotter pin can go nowhere. There is no way that this nut's going to be able to loosen up on its own and the tire rod won't be able to come off causing the the wheel to go out of control. So we're tight, tight, everything's tight coming around here. Perfect, clear to move on to the next step.

Okay, so we've got our caliper on there. Now all you're going to do is you're going to get up inside the vehicle. Well actually want to make sure that your brake fluid is topped off. Of course that's, I mean that's just generally speaking. And then get inside the vehicle and then just pump up the brake until the brake pedal is nice and firm and then you should be clear to go for a road test.

Okay, so now we're going to get the wheel up on here. I've got a couple of lug nuts in my hand. I'm going to take the wheel, put it up against my leg and I'm going to lift with my leg/ab muscles just like that. I'm going to try not to use my back. I don't want to hurt my back. Go like this, lift this up, there we are. I'm holding the wheel. Get one lug nut started on there. Number two started on there. Now I can release the wheel and I can grab the rest of my lug nuts. We have all of our lug nuts on right. We still have to snug them up. To snug them up what we want to do is go in a snowflake pattern on this. Generally speaking, you go crisscross, but this is more like snowflake, so you'd go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay. Never go around in a circle.

You go ahead and go around in a circle, you tighten it up along this way, pulls it in, right. You get over to this side, you think you have a tight, you might even torque it down and it's still cocked off to the side a little bit. You go ahead and hit a bump. Boom. Next thing you know your wheel's ready to fall off. Okay, so just go ahead, go crisscross, star pattern, whatever you want to call it. I'm just going to bottom it out and then we're going to torque them down after. We're going to go ahead and torque down the wheel now to 85 foot-pounds with our 21 millimeter socket. We're going to continue in our snowflake pattern or crisscross, whatever you want to call it. Start here. Go to the opposite side of the wheel. There we are. We know they're all torqued. If you want to hit them again, hit them again. Small price to pay for a little bit of safety. There we are. Easy peasy.

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