We Put $5000 Brakes on our $500 Civic

this is our 500 Civic and today we're gonna be putting five thousand dollars worth of brakes on it it's five thousand dollars worth of breaks really gonna be worth the money let's find out [Music] so you might be wondering why do we need better brakes uh you just saw that these brakes can lock up the tires but the big problem with these brakes is how small they are and how quickly they overheat they get brake fade very easily last time we were out in the canyons after just a couple passes and honestly not using the brakes all that much they were fading and that means that when you push the brake pedal not as much happens as you would like which is a pretty scary thing so today we're going to be upgrading the front and rear brakes we've got some sick spoon parts and we're going to be replacing the rear drums with discs so after today this thing should stop a lot better and do it for a lot longer generally speaking when you're replacing brake calipers and rotors all you really have to do is take off the caliper and disconnect the line take off the rotor and then reverse that to put the new stuff on but it's not going to be quite that simple on this car like we've talked about in the past this is about as base model of a Civic as you could get so what that means is that the brakes are tiny and what that means beyond that is that the knuckle here is not going to work with our new brakes so we're going to take the brakes off then we're also going to take the whole knuckle off and replace it with one from a higher trim model Civic [Music] ah there we go looks just like a knuckle doesn't it not really ah well anyway this is what we needed to remove from the car to replace from a higher trim model unit from a different Civic right here where the brake caliper mounts it's too far inboard so you'll see the pieces that we're replacing it with stick out a little further it's going to let us have a little bit bigger breaks okay so here's the old one a little kind of dinky kind of smaller all around versus this one which is a little bit beefier with that bigger brake mounting bracket another nice benefit is that we've got a fresh lower ball joint which is something I didn't want to have to do so it's great it's already in here now this in and of itself is not that sexy not that fun not that cool but what it lets us install is pretty cool so let's take a look at the brakes that we bought now we're going to throw up our rotor this is a genuine Honda rotor which is nice for future Replacements but then the pace there's a sauce we got some spoon breaks baby nothing is lightweight spoon is known as one of the best most revered aftermarket performance companies for Hondas the parts are known to be really high quality as well as really steezy so these things are going to look awesome when they're installed and they're going to work even better there are four piston designs so we'll get nice even pad pressure on a bigger pad so we'll get a nicer bite and they're going to dissipate heat really well partially because they're larger they can handle more heat but also they're made out of aluminum so that'll help us resist fade which those are the two things we're looking for now you can't forget about the lines we also installed these spoons stainless steel braided lines these don't flex at all when you hit the brake pedal which translates to better brake feel so as we're flying down the Canyons I'll know exactly what's happening through my foot it's going to be great I can't wait oh all right in true spoon fashion the brake pads are yellow blue and yellow baby that guy in there and this guy right up in J here getting all hot and bothered anyways while I work on the brakes shop daddy Adam is going to replace the master cylinder there it is this is the old brake master cylinder and all this does is just send the fluid front and back when you press on the brake this one's bigger since we've got more fluid bigger brakes and disc going in the back we need this one from just newer integras it's a direct bolt-on easy swap [Music] okay so at the rear we have drum brakes these little units these were very commonplace up until not too terribly long ago basically what's going on in here there's two brake shoes which is basically the brake pads and uh as you hit the brakes those are forced outwards and they push against this outer drum to slow the car down and they work okay they're annoying to work on and they're not very good at braking so we're gonna get rid of these and replace them with some discs so down here I have a whole trailing arm set up from an Integra that came with disc brakes so we got to take all this out put all this in easy as that now we got to put that in its place but first I have to transfer that okay so got the arm in place there we'll wait to tighten it up until this is all in place so the most annoying part about this is just going to be fishing the e-brake cable up to where it needs to go while hoisting up this uh trailing arm it's not super heavy it's also not super light watch me struggle all right and you all probably know how disc brake works but in case you don't here it is in simple terms you got the rotor here which is spinning all the time that you're driving it's attached to your wheel basically and then when you want to stop and you hit the brake pedal well this caliper that's sitting here stationary does a little pinch action and it just squeezes on the rotor and brings you down to a nice gradual stop or a screaming halt depending on how hard you push so we replaced the drums with the disc for a couple reasons we saved a little bit of weight and we get a lot better braking coupled with the front brakes this thing is going to be a stopping machine all right so while we're at the rear of the car finishing installing the new disc brakes hebrid was up front pulling out the old proportioning valve and this is our new proportioning valve and with the proportioning valve does is kind of what it sounds like it proportions the amount of brake power that goes to the front brakes versus the rear brakes and since we have disc brakes in the rear now we're going to want a little bit more juice to go to the rear so this proportioning valve is from an Integra and it's from a car that had disc brakes to begin with so we're going to put that sucker right in there and then we should pretty much be good to go throw some fluid in it bleed it hit the streets so in addition to the brakes that we're putting on here we are Scavenging the wheels and tires from the Miata just for now but I want this thing to look a little bit cooler though the fit is going to be a little aggressive so we need to roll the fenders however our Fender roller is a little too tall for the job so I think it's going to be Hammer Time up stop Jimmy you're hurting the car watch me you want to try no no that might be just enough we'll check and then probably Hammer some more it's gonna be okay is it I don't know okay back to working on the brakes now that we've got everything bolted up it's time to refill the system with brake fluid and bleed then brakes and pump it [Music] up and again and then that's gonna be good I don't know exactly what's going on but we just bled the brakes and this brake caliper ain't letting go well I just bled the pressure out of this caliper and now we can move it so my concern is that we got a bad caliper once pressure comes in it's not letting it back out so we're just gonna try to bleed it again and see if anything changes Pump It Up [Music] now hit the brakes now it doesn't now they got hey man if I've learned anything is that things fix themselves all the time yeah we'll go with that it works yeah sometimes you take it apart you put it back together and it's all better all right our brake install is complete we got spoons up front with the stock discs out back we've got our new proportioning valve we've bled the brakes we even took the wheels and tires off the Miata so we can have a nice grippy Tire to take advantage of all of our new braking Force so now the next thing we need to do is hit the streets we're going to bed in the brakes and then we'll see how our new brakes feel let's go [Music] so the idea or the point of betting your brakes is to get your brakes nice and hot and in doing so you will transfer some of that pad material from the brake pads over to the rotors and that's really how brakes work the rotors are always coated in some pad material so the point of bending the brakes is just to get a nice even coating of that material if the coating on your rotors is uneven you can get brake shuttering even to the point that it feels like your rotors are warp that's really all we're doing here is trying to get a nice even coating to make them work as good as they can so to do that we're just going to hit the streets and hit the brakes a bunch of times but you don't actually want to come to a stop you want the rotors to always keep spinning so that they're just getting a nice even coating so what we're going to do is try to hit like 50 miles an hour and come to a hard slow down down to about 10 miles an hour just to get going just get started get some heat into the brakes I'll just kind of drive and hit the break of gas at the same time and kind of power through the brakes for a while at first it'll feel a little bit slippery but by the end they're going to feel real grippy oh look and somebody's pulling out in front of me oh baby now we keep going do it again and again and again and again okay there's 50 let's bring her to a stop now when you're doing this you will notice the braking getting better and better big brakes oh yeah oh come up to a red light better come to a stop okay you can hear it locked up at least one of the wheels there a little bit and as soon as I heard that back off let the wheels keep spinning yeah oh yeah they're starting to bite what a machine starting to smell the brakes a little bit which is good that's how you know you are getting nice and warm um oh yeah okay and that is betting your brakes these brakes are bed and they are ready to rip they feel great brake pedal feels great and by golly I couldn't be happier all right well this little car is coming a long way in just a short period of time whoa all right the brakes feel as good as they look now this thing is stopping on a dime it's also handling well because we've done suspension on it so now I think it's time to get this thing a little more power baby but that's gonna be for next time thank you guys for watching this episode I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned a thing or two I hope you love this little Civic as much as I do and if you do let us know in the comments what you want to see us do next or what you think we're going to do for more power don't forget to subscribe to the channel like the video and throw that comment down there because I'll be looking you can follow me on Instagram at Zac Jobe follow donut media and I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Donut

Views: 1,810,314

Keywords: donut, donut media, cars, james pumphrey, up to speed, moneypit

Id: pK_cuboMH1g

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023