How To Diagnose and Replace a Bad Brake Caliper -EricTheCarGuy

gritty viewers Eric our guy here I get this little show on the Internet where I fix stuff and I videotape it and bring you along the way and hopefully you're entertained by this and perhaps I might even learn something today we have my 1997 Subaru Legacy yeah and the issue that I'm having with the legacy today is I've got some problems with the front calipers so in part of this video I'm going to show you what I found to be the problem with these calipers I'll probably just said the replacement on one side because let's face it it's just a mirror image on the other side so there's no point in doing both but I'm just gonna go through the process of how I found out that I do have a caliper issue replacing the front calipers themselves and also bleeding out the brakes when I'm done so it should be a lot of fun fairly straightforward so I am just going to lift this vehicle you've seen me do it plenty of times and then I'll meet back up with you after I got the front wheels off and we'll get a look at those calipers so that you can see what's going on oh by the way it's cold today ok well as promised I have lifted the vehicle up supported it safely and remove the front wheels I'm just gonna work on this left-hand side it's just easier that way maybe we'll start with the tools at hand I have a rag I have anti-seize silicone paste everybody always asked me where to get this I'll post a link in the description got a pair of channellocks got my ratchet with 18 millimeter socket I've got a pair of needle-nose vise grips with a couple of pieces of fuel line on the ends to help protect the hose when I pinch it off I've got an 8 millimeter wrench a 14 millimeter wrench a 12 millimeter wrench and also a 12 14 wrench also let's not forget our brake cleaner all right well one of the first things that I'm gonna point out that I'm going to recommend you do is to actually turn the key to the unlock position so let's do that real quick alright so what I'll do is I will just take my key turn a oneclick up to the unlock position this way I could turn my steering wheel but I'm not on and the ignition and all that stuff's not on so let's get out of here before the beeping drives me crazy alright now that I've that and I put the key in that position I'm now able to like grab the calper move in any direction because if I hadn't done that I wouldn't be able to do this so now I'll be able to position it in such a way to where I'm able to work on it more easily so our first step is going to be to figure out whether or not the caliper itself needs to be replaced and this is how I made that determination I just took this little rubber plug off here and then these fasteners I guess I didn't need a 12 millimeter I just grabbed it but these are 14 and I'm just gonna undo the bottom one for now okay just set that someplace nice and safe and because I've done that I can just flip the whole caliper up like this to be able to work on it I'm also gonna take those needlenose vice grips with the fuel line and I'm going to crimp off the brake line some people might have issue with this but they actually make tools to do exactly this that have a similar similar stuff to what I have here and what they're concerned with is that you could collapse the inside of the brake hose doing this I personally have never experienced that and I've been doing it this way for a number of years that's not to say that you know it's a foul ball and it can't happen but I'm just passing that along before it ends up in the comments now that I've taken that that cover off that bleeder I'm just gonna put my 8 millimeter wrench on there and then I have my well handy soda bottle / breakbeat bleeder thing here this is just a piece of aquarium tubing a piece of vacuum line on the end here and that's pretty much all it is and I make sure that it's buried down inside the brake fluid so that when fluid comes out it can't suck air back in pretty simple design seems to work well so I'm gonna put this or try to put this do you have issues with this sometimes of fitting these smaller bleeders and that's really not gonna fit too well so I'm just gonna I just removed my vacuum line portion I'm just gonna try to take my hose and put it directly onto a bleeder okay I'm happy with that so now I've got a place for the brake fluid to go instead of on the floor you can put it on your floor whatever I'm gonna take these giant channel locks if you remember these and I'm going to open up the bleeder valve hopefully hook it on something so it stays open you see a little bit of fluid coming out there now but I'm gonna compress the piston with this you can use a c-clamp or something else this is just what I use well they also have a special tool just for doing this but I'm gonna reach in this is the caliper piston here and I'm gonna squeeze this together at least I want to try to gonna be honest I'm having quite a bit of difficulty doing this and this is the problem that I had the other day this should go in fairly easily the fact that it's not means that the caliper piston inside of here could be binding when I tried it a couple of different directions and last but not least I'll show you one other possibility and that is that the bleeder valve itself has a restriction I see these things get rusted up from time to time so it's entirely possible that it's just the bleeder valve this is the problem so what I'll do and I know it's not the brake hose because remember I've got the brake hose pinched off so what I'll do is I'll just remove the bleeder valve completely and I'll inspect it and you'll see a little hole it's down in there that's where the brake fluid initially comes through to work its way through the bleeder valve so if you're able to like blow through this and the brake fluid comes out the bottom then this bleeder valve is clear so it's not an issue with the bleeder valve because what you'll find if this is a problem is you'll see that hole might be all rusted up and I usually just take it over to the wire wheel and clean it up and then in addition to that what I'll do is I'll take like a metal pick or something and pick out any debris that's in there and then I'll blow through it with an air hose to to clean it out so don't condemn a caliper just because of a possible bad bleeder valve is the reason why I'm going through that all this but now that that's out you can see I still get some fluid flow but it's still it should be squirting out right now and it's not so that tells me that this caliper is pretty much in need of replacement and with with my front brakes especially I want to make sure that they're as good as they can be so we are gonna make ourselves video on replacing this caliper one more thing to note before I will turn it the right way Eric one more thing to note before I get too deep into this is that in addition to the piston itself being bound up inside the bore there's also these slide pins that can get stuck or frozen that could cause the caliper not to move so if you have like say this is what you're looking for if if you brake if while you're driving down the road and you brake and it pulls to one side that's a good indication that you may have a caliper problem it could be some other problem but it could be a caliper problem and what that would mean is like say for instance it pulled to the right that's actually the caliper that's working so I'd be looking at the left caliper in that situation and just the opposite if it will pull the left it pull the left I'd be looking at the right caliper but another thing that could cause a caliper not to work are these slides and periodically I recommend going through and adding some lubrication to that the same silicon paste it does not have to be 3m but I don't use grease to lubricate these and the reason I say that is because these rubber boots are made of a petroleum product grease is also a petroleum product the two things get together and the grease will actually eat away at this rubber and as a result what happens is is it will cause this pin to bind in its bore and then once you've got grease in there it's a pain to get it out but that's what you have to do if you end up with great here so I get this a lot this is the reason why I'm going through so much trouble and mentioning all this I've got another little fYI for you as far as checking out to see if if your caliper is bad you see how it got that uneven where like one pad is worn a whole bunch and the other one isn't worn so much and also look at the other side the other side the brake pads are worn a lot more than this side so if you see something like that the first thing I go for is the caliper slides and make sure that those are moving like they're supposed to and if they're not lubricated with silicone paste but if they are moving ok the next thing I do is I check the piston to make sure that that's doing what it's supposed to and normally what I find is it's the piston when it comes down to that but it could just as easily be the the caliper slides and one last thing to note is if you do have an issue like this or it looks like this is these are worn down more than one side than the other another possibility is that the brake hoses failed ok so how you would check for that as you would get inside the car you would pump the brakes a bunch of times and then go out and crack the bleeder if you see fluid squirting out then it's quite possible you've got a bad brake hose but if the fluid does not squirt out under pressure then you're probably okay but that's that's how I do a check for a brake hose problem moving on shut up air can do something all right well this is what we're gonna do I'm just going to slide that Calver out my brake pads are and you can see that I've got a little bit of a crack there from some overheating like it might have been bound up so I do have plenty of brake pad left here but I'm gonna replace these anyway I'm also gonna replace the rotors you know what I mean here why not just do it all before I get too far I'm gonna disconnect my breakups our brake hose is here and I believe that's my 12 it is so 12 millimeter on this so there's this right here is the banjo bolt that goes inside of there and once I get that out there you'll see why they call it a banjo bolt but we are going to remove that let's do it and you could put like a drain pan or something underneath here to clean up the drippings because there will be some there'll be some residual that's left over inside the caliper but the replacement of the caliper isn't that difficult it's making sure that you actually need a caliper and you're gonna spend that kind of money that does make a difference okay remember I called this a banjo bolt well it's got that hole in there with a fluid that can go into it and it can come out here so fluid can flow through this and this is the part that is the banjo fitting it's got the same kind of hole through it that kind of thing I hope that information is useful to you so now we're completely disconnected and we can just let things just sort of hang there now these have washers and I've talked about this in other caliper videos I'm not a fan of the copper washers that they give you sometimes with calipers but if they are the steel type I say go for it and use those steel types replace them alright now we've got the main portion of our caliper removed I'm just going to set that aside for now and there's just two more fasteners these are 18 millimeter and give you a closer look of those okay in here you have two fasteners one there at the top and the bottom these are both 18 millimeter head fasteners I'm gonna be removing those next well maybe these are actually 17 because it's a fit and kind of sloppy yeah these are actually 17 I'm gonna tighten this up just a little bit because I've seen quite a bit of your picture coming out of here the idea is to lose as little fluid as possible that will make bleeding the brakes easier when you're done came back with a 17 looks like this strut bolts gonna give me some trouble so I brought along a wrench just in case with rusty stuff make sure you're all the way on the fastener and I like long wrenches you really help with leverage as you can see no problem busting that loose I'm gonna do the same to bottom I'm along here stop hitting on my ranch I'm gonna hit on my ratchet it's got a soft end on it personally with rusty fasteners I prefer that impacting motion but I've also had people make comments that's a bad thing to do because it can cause damage and carpal tunnel and those kind of things so wait the risk make your own choice notice I knocked them both loose first if you do this top one and take it all the way out and then you go to do this bottom one this whole assembly will flop back like this it's pain in the butt the opposite is true for the other side all right that's like my bolt is somewhat rusted in place not uncommon for a vehicle this age and in this neck of the woods rust is just part of life especially on one that's is well taken care of is this Subaru was all right there was a caliper bracket so I can just set that aside also for now um what are we careful with these parts because these are cores and you want to be sure that they accept your course cuz if they don't it's a problem alright I can just remove the rotor now by pulling it off there's no screws or anything that hold this on see my ABS tone ring here want to be real careful of that any damage to this could actually cause an ABS light to come on so we'll just be careful there okay now I brought our parts over to the bench you can get a little bit better look at my rusty caliper that I just don't brake fluid all over the floor in the bench with they can be really particular about your your core returns so just make sure that you you've got everything that you need here and I'm just gonna insert that pin back in I'm also gonna take the bolt but before I take this bolt I'm gonna take my new caliper I'm gonna make sure that it's the same size because make sure that this is also fourteen millimeter sometimes they change the size on these and sometimes they're all over the place so sometimes they're 12 sometimes are 14 or what-have-you and if you're doing a brake job and you want to just take one set of tools and be done with it well now is a good time to make sure that you can do that because the caliper remanufacturers just don't care they're just grab what's in the box I think so if you it's not a problem to take your old fasteners and swap them over to the new caliper so long as you take those fasteners and put them over on this that way the thing is complete they want to make sure that your core is complete now these are those dreaded copper washers that I personally do not like however my other caliper came with the steel washers that I do like so I'm gonna be using these and then another thing I do to make it nice for my parts guy I'll take the plug out of the new caliper I'll put it into the new one and also install my bolt I'm not gonna tighten I'm just gonna keep it like that now the shims your new caliper may not come with shims mine did so we'll be able to install brand new shims and I really like that so we're good there so I can take that set it aside get it ready to go back to rebuild land but before I put this on the car see ya I want to knock this one loose so that oh it already is kinda loose so it's easy to install because I'm gonna install the bracket and then the actual caliper I can do the exact same thing I can just pivot the bracket up and then pull it off of the one pin look at that it's lubricated with silicone not grease it better be lubricated with silicone I'm pretty sure it is I'm gonna add a little more of my own just to make sure that's a good thing and also it looks like it's coming with a new banjo bolt that's actually kind of kind of nice oh and new indicators that's good because I didn't have indicators on my old brake pads let's face it the install is gonna be pretty much the reverse of removal there's one exception hey I'm installing new rotors here but they have a coating on them you may or may not be able to see there that coating is called cosmoline it's a rust inhibitor it keeps these things from rusting in the box before you get them I just take a little bit of brake clean got a clean rag this crosshatch pattern is nice it helps a pad seeped in it's not often it's not really necessary but it it is nice you [Music] don't have to get the cosmoline off the Hat just the actual rotor itself and put the rotor on first don't try to put the caliper bracket on first that would not work out now to make things easier I'm gonna install my shims now rather than I could do it while it's already on it doesn't really matter but the shims follow the contours of the caliper so I just take and these these aren't like there isn't a top and a bottom to this they're just they just are so goes on around my shins no installed slide the bracket in place my my two caliper bolts some of you might be wanting to put anti-seize on these I you know something like brakes really wasn't meant to have like lubricants on this stuff so I I'm not saying you can't do what you want cuz you're gonna anyway but I don't do anything if anything what I should be doing here is I should get off my lazy butt and go get my oil can and put a couple of drops of oil in these that would be like a good thing I'm gonna show you something else that you shouldn't do is use a tool that you're not supposed to use as a hammer but once again it's it's handy and I'm here then I ever think that eric the car guy is perfect cuz I'm not I got to do is read through the comments and find out how imperfect I am same drill here I want to make sure that both my fasteners are started and well established before I tighten anything all the way down because what may seem like it's grabbing threads may not be grabbing threads also cross threading is an issue if you tighten one down before together there is a torque spec for this I'm sure but I'm gonna put it about here and sing with us and keep in mind these are my long wrenches say they are Eric make sure you're turning it the right way I get confused sometimes especially when it's on the other side all right roads in place caliper brackets in place let's install some brake pads and lubricate some brake pins hello we're here I'm going to take that same clean rag I had I'm gonna pull out the pins and actually these are perfectly lubricated with silicon paste so that it's not grease and silicon so even at the caliper remanufacture they know to use silicon here so please please please use it and invariably whenever I say that somebody's gonna come out and say well can I use grease no don't use grease I'm now going to install my brake pads and since this came with a new wear indicator I'm going to place that on the leading edge so as this as this wheel rotates I'm on the left-hand side now that makes the bottom side of the inside pad the leading edge and that's that's where I personally I always place my wear indicators this this is the thing that makes noise when your brakes wear out so it sticks down just a little bit further so that as that brake pad gets down to that point that wear indicator is gonna start to make contact with the rudder and make a heck of a racket so that you take a look at your brakes now before I put any lubricants on this I'm gonna slide this in here to see if that will even fly because with this brake Shemp new brake shim in place it might not might cause a problem I am running into some difficulty ah you know what I just noticed something see this little area on the pad that's where the wear indicator goes I'm just digging it right in there yeah as guess what that spot was made for it so look look for that on the brake pads so somebody already did that and they've got them on both sides so that's that's where the indicator is gonna rest now let's see how it goes in try to figure out what exactly it is it's giving me trouble here looks like it's making contact at the inside of the caliper bracket a little bit there's nothing with my indicator or anything but you can see where the brake pad was actually making contact with the what the caliper know if that's the caliper or the brake pads both are quote-unquote quality parts well I suppose we could determine if the Briton hits the brake pads by slipping in when the old brake pads right now this is the one that used to live back there and that went right in that one right in like it's supposed to and I can see how that new brake pad has that difference so that's how you find out if you got an issue there or not so and you get a different set of brake pads I'll be back and we're back I have the new set of brake patch what's up compared to the old set of brake pads and I know that they are correct so I'm now going to install these but before I do I'm gonna take the anti-seize that I showed you earlier in the program and just touch a little bit on where the brake pad makes contact with the caliper itself and I'm not putting a great deal on this I'm just putting enough just to give a slight coating but stuff like this you put too much and contaminate the actual friction material you're kind of taking a step backwards so you want to try to avoid that all right the bottom one was perfect my upper pin however could use just a little bit more once again I'm going with the silicon paste here then I can just take the caliper slide it right in and make sure it goes over the top and something I get asked about a lot is you might get like a little air bubble in here just pinch it to sort of burp it when you push it in because that little air bubble can actually cause enough tension on the caliper to cause uneven pad wear believe it or not seeing that so cycle it down it's gone this is 14 and I'm sure that the astute viewer will notice that the new brake pads already had the indicators installed now I'm gonna bring my brake line down real important you don't get this twisted it's got lines on it so just make sure that those lines don't aren't twisted around when you do this you don't want to twist the brake hose and as I stated I'm going to install my new washers on my new banjo bolt one on each side of the brake hose and just thread it into place I'm very careful not to cross thread this guy you cross thread this it's pretty much game over Oh remember how I told you to use different sizes well that's kind of what they did to me here and because of that I'm quite literally gonna switch back I went and got my old bolt now the old washer is still on here so I'm just gonna take my pocket screwdriver just sort of slip it in between and knock that loose to get that off of there old boat new washers I'm prom with that new bolt different size than the old one like some goofy size I'm not really I don't like that you can do what you like but I'm not going there same deal one washer on the inside one washer on the other side sort of sandwich them to place thread pitch everything is the same it's just the head of the fastener that's different don't go so tight you strip it out go tight and snug actually once everything's all said and done I want you to go back and check it for leaks now I can remove my vice grips here and what I'll do while I go and do the other side is I'll just crack the bleeder let's sit I got a couple of rags underneath here that I'm using to catch my brake fluid but I'll just let that sit and do what's called gravity bleed what'll happen is the fluid will come down through the hose fill up the piston chamber and start dripping out there I'll tighten that up and I'll have that much less threat to bleed when I go and do the final bleed on the system all right you can see we got some drip it's going on let's seal that back up and we can begin to bleed the air all right now here's a piece of inside information that actually I probably should have showed you before I put the brake pads on but on some vehicles you'll notice that the rotors held down by screws and this keeps it centered onto the hub and keeps it from flopping around like this and basically makes the installation of the caliper and pads a lot easier now when you go to really bleed the brake so let the wheels on its gonna flop around whoa I should say that that those screws really mean nothing once you've both the wheel on it's not like the rotors gonna go anywhere but as far as assembly goes it can make it somewhat cumbersome well in order to work with this and prevent this an old axle minute you just put right on the rotor and that just sort of holds everything in place and holds it steady I'm also gonna put one on the other side this way the rotor and everything is centered so when I go to bleed the brakes I won't get a mushy pedal feel you might get a mushy pedal because the caliper and everything and the rotor assembly are moving around a little too much so this this will help prevent that I'm guessing what might come next is Eric since I bled out the air since I did the front calipers do I have to bleed all four wheels no you do not you do have to before you start anything top off the master cylinder because if you run the master cylinder dry you will have to bleed all four wheels and you don't want to have to do that I'm also gonna push my little thing down in there get it all seated all right now be careful because brake fluid eats through paint so try to keep it away from the paint but come on this my 97 Subaru give me a break okay before I even open the bleeders now now that I have them gravity bled I'm gonna basically seat the caliper under the pads there's good there's gonna be a little bit of extra space between the caliper and the pads now that they're new so I want to make sure that that piston moves out enough to make contact with the pads and how I'll do that is I'll pump the brakes a few times this also makes it so the air is pretty much ready to come out of the system so it puts it in a better place so I'll pump the brakes a few times until I begin to feel something on the pedal some resistance like I am right there and that'll mean that my in fact that feels pretty good right as it is and that way I want to go to bleed everything out on I'm sort of ahead of the game now many people are gonna say they want to start furthest from the master to begin the bleeding procedure and I'm not going to say that's wrong it's just not how I do it I'm just gonna start here at the same caliper of the left front caliper I'm gonna bleed it out I'm gonna move over to the right side once again you don't have to bleed all four wheels unless you run the master cylinder dry fits on there a lot nicer and because I have this tube here that's sitting down inside of liquid it can't really draw air back up in I'm not gonna let it sit there for a long period of time but this way the air is forced out through the fluid but when it tries to come back in its gonna draw fluid it's not gonna draw hair so I like using this method method especially when I'm by myself and I'm just gonna pump the brakes a few times until I see it come out without any air as you can see it didn't take much because we gravity bled it cut it off and I didn't see any air so I'm actually gonna call this side dump move the other side I like to make sure that these get back on because once they get corroded down inside remember I told you about that thing about the bleeders that can cause it not to bleed properly well a lot of times you'll find that that rubber cap is missing when that happens okay I can't stress enough how letting the master cylinder run dry is not a good thing but I can actually top this off now because I'm finished with my bleeding procedure I'm gonna pump up the brakes a few times check it over see if I see any leaks particularly run those banjo fittings and those washers if I do I will replace those washers and recheck and obviously rebleed the system now once you're done bleeding both sides start the engine up and feel how the brake pedal feels because this might feel a little bit different but also I'm gonna post a link to my sponge brake pedal video so that may also help just feel the brake pedal okay caliper replacement on the 1997 Subaru Legacy I know I've done caliper replacement videos in the past but each and every time I do one of these I try to address a lot of the comments that are made to previous videos it's sort of almost an opportunity to make an Ori video also there's some vehicle specific things that come up but in general I think at this point if you've watched all these videos that I've made you see sort of a pattern and that's just what I follow that's a that's a method that I use nothing you have to use that you may do something completely different in fact feel free to let me know in the comments if you like or there'll be a link in the description to a discussion about this video over at my forum but the idea is you want to make sure you lose all the air you want to make sure you diagnose it correctly and I've tried to incorporate that information into this video anyway I am eric the car guy you can always find me over at eric the car guy dot-com where if you have automotive questions i would ask that you type in a couple of keywords to my search function if you don't get an answer when you type in those keywords I mean don't type in a whole paragraph but if you don't get an answer when you type in those keywords feel free to sign up for a forum that's free and we'd be more than happy to help you over there in fact that's where I go to answer automotive questions which there are many but we try we all we all try Google+ Facebook Twitter and I close with be safe have fun and of course stay tardy people I will see you next time

Channel: EricTheCarGuy

Views: 2,052,037

Rating: 4.8400512 out of 5

Keywords: brake caliper, finding bad brake caliper, how to find bad caliper, brake caliper replacement, brake caliper fix, car pulls when braking, caliper problems, caliper sticking, front caliper, rear caliper, Subaru, Subaru Legacy, Subaru caliper, stuck caliper, bad caliper, caliper fail, caliper slides, sticking piston, bleeding brakes, gravity bleed, brake fluid, automotive education, auto repair, diy, eric the car guy, ericthecarguy, etcg

Id: _UqTgYgd0Mk

Length: 35min 22sec (2122 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2013