Chevy Truck and Tahoe BRAKE Upgrade EASY How To!

howdy guys i'm auto edits jason and today in the garage we're back on the tahoe and i'm gonna do a full break system refresh on this thing now we're gonna start with some remanufactured stock style pieces and i'm gonna key in on a few upgrades i'd love to share with you guys that will take your brake system on these older rigs to the next level this is a good one and it won't break the bank [Music] all right so let's quickly run through the ingredients in today's install video starting here with the power stop brakes z36 truck and tow package now this is 248 bucks and it comes with remanufactured power coated red calipers with cross-drilled and slotted rotors love those things have them on the truck and on the jeep uh just absolutely worth it especially on a 20 something year old vehicle and then kind of the highlight to me is the z36 pads i've had such great experience with these things these are carbon fiber ceramic pad they make no dust then i replaced the master cylinder with this stock replacement ray bestos oem master cylinder for this thing the one that was on there was just leaking and it had just black sludge in the bottom of it knew that from the get go so that was no big surprise this was very inexpensive this is about 60 65 brand new and then over here we're gonna get into some of the trick little things that get forgotten now on all most oem brake systems they have a few sections they have a lot of hard line and then they'll have a few sections of rubber or flex line on this vehicle there are three flex lines there are two on the front calipers and then one that goes from the brake line to the differential and goes out on the rear axle so i recommend you replace all three of those flex lines especially on an older vehicle like this with a brand new stainless steel braided line because it gives you a better pedal feel no matter how good you bleed your brakes and we'll be using the lucas dot four brake fluid for this thing uh dot three and dot four this system calls for dot three dot four is a newer fluid they're both compatible so dot three and dot four are both backwards forwards compatible dot four is a little bit better because it has a higher boiling point meaning if you tow or do a high performance type application uh it takes more heat before you get air in the brake line so dot four is a good way to go i knew the original brake cylinder was compromised from the moment i lifted the hood and checked it you know when i went to drive this thing back from san jose back down here to los angeles and it you know that was because when you open the hood there's corrosion down at the bottom of the booster so you can see that it had been dripping and as i popped the top it just had this tiny bit of black sludge in the bottom so i immediately just went to the auto parts store and just filled it up with brake fluid just to get me home and it's been doing actually pretty okay uh so i just knew that that was a time it was it was going to be needing to be rebuilt or replaced and i could see the rust in the back of the piston here so i knew that was something i was going to need to get done it is not hard to swap that thing out matter of fact it's super easy barely an inconvenience it's the two bolts on the booster and the two brake lines one for the rear one for the front into the side and then bleeding that will be a challenge but we're going to worry about that because i have a pressure bleeder now in a minute so let's get to the rears [Music] in the back here we have two main things to feature and i'll start with the thing that's the coolest part and that's replacing the rubberized the rubber flex hose that goes from the chassis to the actual rear axle that splits out to both rear drums here and replacing it with the stainless the stainless steel braided line from skyjacker and that's a really cool thing because again it gives you that firmer pedal because as you can imagine this these lines these rubber lines they balloon out under heavy pressure and that also contributes to a spongier petal or just you know some slightly less confidence and over years these lines will break down this is something i've always heard and always wanted to find out so let's do this this is a 20 something year old break line let's cut it in half right down the middle and see how bad the inside is and you know they don't look that bad it certainly hasn't collapsed over the years like a lot of people will say that oh the rubber breaks down and collapses which could be that wasn't the case here but i'm replacing that anyway because it's just something that i like to do and speaking of let's talk about these drums here so i went ahead and just replaced the shoes with the power stop shoes the stock oem shoes for the rear of this thing now eventually i want to do disc brakes back here but right now i really just want this thing to be a driver and these are 24 bucks for a set of shoes for the rear and it just they work good enough you know um and i just used all the stock hardware you know the video i watched to get this was eric the car guys 10 year old video on doing drum brakes on an old gm and it was awesome and here's a tip he gave me that i've been missing on drum brakes all these years each shoe rides against this backing plate in three ears or three tabs and what he reminded you to do in that video or me to do in that video was to actually sand down or scotch bright each of those contact patches because originally they put some grease or something on there and then it just kind of cakes up over the years and sure enough the whole reason i replaced these is because this pad was worn from here to here down to the rivets and it was because the the shoe got caught up on that it wouldn't re-center and that's why his tip is so cool so what i did was i scotch-brited all three tabs every all the mounting points where they actually hit the backing plate and put a little bit of anti-seize a little bit of lubricant high temp lubricant on each one of those things so they are like butter they re-center you know i can put the drum on hit the e-brake and they re-center perfectly so there you go there's another pro tip for you there when you're doing your shoes oh and there you have it that's the rear and you may notice as well that i have done a bit of a rattle can restoration here under the chassis that's just with that semi-gloss black spray paint so let's get the front caliper installed and then we'll just bleed these things and that's there's another tip into that section as well [Music] time to put the final caliper on the front and these remanufactured and powder coated units from power stop brakes are pretty great i'm running them on everything right now and it's nice peace of mind again a lot of these things on these builds there are certain things that you can just fit in you know that to your budget and to what your intended use is and for me i like that peace of mind this is a 20 plus year old vehicle uh this one is actually in pretty decent shape i've been watching a lot of videos online and i see guys where literally when they'll do the upgrade up here it's just a bunch of rust colored uh things that almost look like car parts i mean here on the west coast we're so blessed with this you know so um but it's nice to be able to freshen up some stuff now some things to think of before you put your even these remanufactured ones is inside these little slide are sliders on these things and so you just put a little bit they come pre-greased but put a little bit of high temp grease inside that slider there and then just put your little rubber boots back on that's a little tip there it's always good to just do that and then the coup de gras on this are the z36 pads you guys hear me hooting and hollering about that but what you do before you put your pads in is you take a little of the lube that either comes with it or some anti-seize found i found works really good for this as well anywhere that the pad will touch the caliper here i put a little bit of anti-seize or a little bit of lubricant on there and that seems to help that process a little bit so i'll put that inside here as well because i know that there will be a pad touching right here try not to get it all over yourself but that is part of the anti-seize curse is that it will you obviously don't want to get any of the lubricant on the braking surface itself and so i happen to know that these pads will touch right here so i'll put a little bit on this outer surface both sides this is the inside pad i do like the way these work here that you just kind of hold themselves into place there we go inside in the outside actually slots right in to these little grooves right here so get that one in place get that in place and that's it now our caliper is ready to install i like to use a little bit of orange loctite on the caliper mounting bolts here i would do that to your whatever your preferences are i've had good luck with that i just want to have that security we're going to torque those down to 36 foot-pounds in a minute but i i like the peace of mind again of a little bit of loctite on there so we'll just go ahead and slide that into place start our caliper bolts so easy i like this little system now it's time for some fun we're going to install the actual brake line and that is as simple as we'll put the little adapter here which is just a little block and the banjo you just put it's basically the banjo bolt goes through here there's a little block right here and you put your make sure you have washer on either side of that and there's a little dash three here that makes that super easy to get to the car so let's tighten that down that gets torqued to 38 foot-pounds now to just attach where the stock fitting went in to the hard line here down to here with our flex and i put a little plug up here so i'm going to go ahead and put a little rag up here because i'm sure i'm sure it's going to leak a little bit and we don't want to make a huge mess okay [Applause] that's coming down and then we'll just go through that sorry we're already seeing brake fluid out of that thing which is actually great we'll go ahead and get that buttoned up here just to keep this from making more of a mess what we'll do is we'll spray a little bit of brake clean up in here to clean up our mess you don't want any residual brake fluid just sitting on stuff up there i think i'm gonna want it to run just like this just like that so now i'll grab a 7 16 and just put a quick tighten on the dash 3 fitting here that will button that up now we just got to attach it i'll use some zip ties here make it uh functional and you just got to make sure that it will it will go through the full travel so we know we're at full droop so we're good there reach-wise so it just has to make sure that it goes all the way left all the way right how's that look i think it's time to bleed these things and i have another trick for you guys [Music] and for our final trick for the bleeding as you guys know on this channel or if you haven't i've always done it with a pump at the at the actual wheel cylinder and you know it just takes forever and i've been able to do get decent results with that but i finally got talked into getting one of these things they're not that expensive i'll put one of the links i'll put all the links to all this stuff in either the description and or you can go to my amazon store and pick some of this stuff up because it's become so helpful i can't believe i waited this long to get one of these things this is mode of pressure bleeder and what you do is you know i actually got this thing to do joe's jeep and there's an adapter let me get that for you guys for the different style of master cylinders so this is obviously the one that would go for the jeep and then i got this universal adapter that you just used a couple of change a couple of wing nuts on these things to give yourself a seal onto that thing and then you just pump it up and you can build pressure in your system and this takes the place of pumping and uh having somebody on the pedal if you don't always have someone available all right so now that we can build some good pressure here we'll start at the back of the vehicle and bleed our way to the front so the rear tires we'll do those then we'll do the fronts and the other thing to watch is just to make sure that you never let this dry and you can actually fill this thing with brake fluid and it will continually fill this but i'm not i i'm i have like weird issues about you're not supposed to store brake fluid because of you know it attracts the moisture so i'm going to just do it old school and take the time to undo this and get another seal and just keep topping it off that way but you can do it that's the right way to do it don't don't do it do it don't do it my way do it the right way but that way this will be easier to preserve for the next job i won't have so much cleanup all right we've got something let's go bleed so i just put a little bleeder hose here and we will just open this up and let them let the fluid flow i could actually see some fluid starting to flow and we'll have to do two things we're not just bleeding the rears we're actually flushing so we want to make sure that all of the fluid see down on the bottom there it's pitch black the fluid that's coming out you can actually see it right here in the line it's it's black that's bad so what we'll do is we'll keep an eye on that until that turns clear and we don't want to make sure that we don't run the master cylinder dry oh we're full here let's go dump this thing keep going here nice and clear that's what i'm talking about now it's time for the bleed and for the bleed i actually turn the hose up so i can actually really get a good feel for the air bubbles hard to see in this light but oh it's perfect i didn't see any air bubbles and nice clear fluid okay we'll come back and do this again we'll do this in a couple of rounds but there you go that's how you bleed the back let's get to the front so we have good pressure in there the backs are done now before i do the fronts i want to show you guys how to bleed the if your truck does have an abs module there's a little bleeder valve up here let me show you where to bleed that thing all right so this is the anti-lock breaking system on this so there's a little rubber cap that goes over that and there's a little plunger right here that you'll just hit a few times to bleed any air out of there there wasn't really any air to be bled but better safe than sorry all right so in the front just get a little bit of pressure and open that thing up and since we gravity bled these things they are literally there are no bubbles that's amazing wow let's see what the fluid looks like it's perfectly clear that's exactly what we wanted you can see inside there the fluid is perfectly clear perfect let's go check the pedal see if we got a nice solid pedal [Music] okay we'll let the air out of this guy release the lid telling you this guy is a game changer really makes this job easy we'll go check the pedal just to make sure but i'm pretty sure we got it good our levels are golden put our lid on seal up your brake system oh that feels good sounds good all right let's check and see what the pedal feels like oh feels really good that's a nice firm pedal i'll take that for a first go around [Music] and there you have it a full and complete break refresh on the tahoe now this applies to other vehicles as well same principles replace rubber lines with steel braided lines uh good friction material i'm very happy with the power stop z36 and now it's just time for me to put some miles on the thing i'm going to go get it aligned of course i have the eyeball on it for now and that'll be enough for me to do the next important thing and that's to actually seat the brakes and i show you guys that procedure on the jeep video when i show you the install and that's going through some heat cycles because the carbon fiber ceramic pads actually embed onto the rotors and just that's what makes the magic on these things and then we see what's next and start heading out for some adventures thank you guys so much for watching until next time enjoy your drive time for me to start driving this thing

Channel: AutoEdits

Views: 43,706

Keywords: autoedits, auto edit, jason lewis, 4x4, how to, install, tahoe, chevy, chevrolet, obs, powerstop, brakes, superlift, bleed, lucas, oil, z36, carbon fiber, rotor, drum, flush, upgrade, refresh, raybestos, master cylinder, lines, synthetic, skyjacker, stainless, braided, flex, autoedits jason, auto edits tahoe, gmt400 brake upgrade, brake upgrade, obs chevy tahoe, obs tahoe, brake bleed, chevrolet tahoe, obs chevy, auto edits, obs truck, obs suburban, brake master cylinder upgrade gmt 400 88-98 trucks

Id: LOGssNG4zTw

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021