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TRQ brake pads are manufactured using premium raw materials and design standards to restore original performance. TRQ brake pads are positive molded and utilize a multi-layer shim for enhanced performance and service life. TRQ’s combination of materials and design ensures a low dust and low noise braking experience. TRQ recommends replacing your brake rotors when you replace your brake pads to ensure even wear of components and improved braking comfort. All products are fit and road-tested in our Massachusetts R&D facility to ensure we deliver on our promise of Trusted Reliable Quality.
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WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including Lead and Lead Compounds, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.
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This item is backed by our limited lifetime warranty. In the event that this item should fail due to manufacturing defects during intended use, we will replace the part free of charge. This warranty covers the cost of the part only.
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Brought to you by 1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet.
Hi, I'm Mike from 1A Auto. I hope this how-to video helps you out, and next time you need parts for your vehicle, think of 1AAuto.com. Thanks.
In this video, we're going to show you how to take apart and put back together the front brakes on this 2003 Subaru Outback. It's the same as any 2000 to 2004. At 1A Auto, we do sell new brake kits for this, so this will go along nicely if you buy a new set of brakes from us. The brakes on this vehicle happen to be in good shape, so we just take them apart and put them back together to show you. Tools you'll need include jack and jack stands, 14mm, 17mm, and 19mm sockets, although your tire iron can substitute for that 19mm socket. You'll need a ratchet plus a breaker bar or a pipe for some extra leverage, a large screwdriver or a small pry bar, large hammer, a large C-clamp, wire brush, and a torque wrench.
If you don't have air tools, start out with your vehicle on the ground, loosen the lug nuts first, and then raise and support your vehicle. Remove the lug nuts and the wheel and tire with a tire iron or 19mm socket and ratchet. Now either grab the tie rod and the suspension and turn the wheel, or turn the steering wheel.
Now look in, behind. You can see right through this little check hole and I'll show you you can see the rotor moving there and the next is the pad. It appears the inner pad is actually in pretty good shape. What we're going to do is take the caliper off and you can actually pull on the caliper and try pulling on it a little bit which forces the piston back in. You can also use a screwdriver. I'll show you that in a minute.
You want to remove this bolt and this bolt here. I'm going to take a large screwdriver, put right in here and pry out. That forces the piston back in and loosens this up a little bit. You want to use a 14mm socket with a ratchet and these bolts should not be on too tight. They come off pretty easy. Just speed it up here as I remove those bolts the rest of the way. The bolts come out. Then the caliper comes right off. Just let it rest up there for right now.
Here are our pads. You can actually see there's quite a bit left. The brakes are in pretty good shape. The front pad comes out, the rear pad comes out. Again, the same thing. These pads have good life left. Next is the rotor. You'll want to remove two larger bolts one here and one right down here. These are 17mm. You've got a 17mm socket. I'm going to put my ratchet on there, and use a breaker bar or using a piece of pipe with my ratchet. The pipe gives me a little extra leverage. Pull up nice and easy until the bolt breaks free. Because of the position of this upper one, it's a little to get to, you're going to put a 17mm wrench on it and use an 18mm wrench and lock it on. Then again like the pipe I'm going to pull up slowly until it breaks free.
Fast-forward here again as we just remove those bolts the rest of the way. If you remove the bolts, just take the bracket right off. This plate may need a hammer. If you're replacing your rotors (and you're not too worried about it) you can just bang it from the outside. Sometimes, what you may need to do is put your lug nuts back on. What I'm doing here is using the ball side of my hammer, and you want to beat on the rotor in the hub area. You want to avoid contacting the area where the brake pads contact the rotor. You don't want to put dents and divots in that area because that can affect your braking that's if you're reusing your disc. If you're not reusing your disc, you can actually feel free to bang on it on the outside, but the reason you hit it here is that actually breaks the rotor free from the hub.
Now, you can see I'm hitting it much more lightly from the backside as it's free from the hub and now it's coming off. As soon as I see it pretty much breaking lose, you can see it move pretty well there. Now I'm going to remove the lug nuts and then remove the rotor. The pads and rotors on the car are in good shape, so we are just putting it back together with its original parts. I'm not going to waste new parts on a car that doesn't need it.
Next, you'll want to take your caliper bracket, and there's stainless steel slides, so use a wire brush and just clean out the slides where the brake pads contact them. Put this bracket in and feed the top bolt in. Speed it up as we first tighten those bolts as much as we can with the fingers, and then preliminarily tighten them with a wrench. These two bolts should be tightened to 90 foot-pounds. The bottom is easy to get a torque wrench on. The top one again, you can't really get a torque wrench on it. I'll use my wrenches to tighten it up, and I'll have to just get it nice and tight and then pull it and kind of estimate it.
The way front brakes adjust is as the pads wear down and these pistons work their way up and out of the caliper. What you need to do is force those pistons back in. I generally put the old inner pad back on like that, and then I use a large C-clamp, put that in place, and with the pad, it forces both calipers back down in. I put the C-clamp on and here I'm just readjusting it more to the center of the caliper so it pushes both pistons back in equally.
As you saw, our pads are in pretty good shape, so we're going to reinstall the other ones, I'm just showing you how to do this. You generally want to install this one with the wear indicator on the inside pointed down, so just put them right back in. All the way back in. One other thing you want to check is the caliper brackets. These slides where the caliper bolts on should move nice and easily, and they do. If they don't, you just pull them right out, clean them up, put a little grease on them, and put them back together.
Put the caliper back on. Then push these slides in so the caliper goes down into place. Speed it up here as I put the two 14mm bolts back in and tighten them preliminarily with my fingers. Then these should be tightened up to anywhere from 19 to 21 foot-pounds. Speed it up here again as I straighten out the steering, put the wheel on, put the lug nuts on by hand first make sure you don't cross thread them and then use your wrench to just preliminarily tighten them. When done with this side, we're going to torque the lug nuts to 100 foot-pounds using a star pattern. You always want to replace your brakes in pairs. The procedure is the same for the other side.
After this there is one more step. Pump your brakes to get a firm pedal, then do test stops from 5 and 10 miles an hour, and make sure the brakes are working before road testing the vehicle.
We hope this video helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Please feel free to call us toll-free, 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the Internet and in person.
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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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