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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 Green. I am one of the owners of 1AAuto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20 plus years of experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.
In this video, we're going to show you how to replace the front brake pads and rotors on this 2004 Dodge Ram 1500. This is a full-drive. This procedure is generally the same for most of this generation truck. Tools you'll need are 7/8, actually, or a 22 millimeter, pretty much the same size, 13/16", 13 millimeter sockets, ratchet. You'll probably want a breaker bar or a pipe to get some leverage on your ratchet handle. A sledge hammer if your rotors are rusted like they were on our vehicle, a large screwdriver or a small pry bar, wire brush, large C-clamp and we also use some penetrating oil.
First, you want to remove your wheel. If you're just using hand tools, start with the vehicle on the ground, loosen the lug nuts first and then raise it, secure it with jack stand then remove the wheel. I've got air tools and I use them. Either the 7/8" or 22 millimeter, both will work. Okay, and we'll fast forward here as I remove the lug nuts, the cap and the wheel. Now, with the wheel off, you can check the condition of your brakes or your rotors. Use the back of your finger. Just run them up and if you're feeling hard ridges, or this actually has some pretty deep bruise here so I'm actually going to replace these rotors. Then you can check the condition of your pads. As you can see, my pads are actually in pretty good shape. The pad is right there and I will only turn the rotor. On the rotor, you can see turning for pads right next to it. There are some pretty good bites in the pad but I don't like the look of these rotors so I'm going to replace the rotors and pads.
What you want to do, take a large pry bar or large screw driver or a small pry bar like this. You're going to pry out on the caliper. It pushes the pistons. These are pistons right here. By prying out those pistons, get pushed back into the caliper. You remove the caliper; you're going to want to remove two 13 millimeter bolts, one here and then one up here. Pretty easy and it's loosen up, supposed to be too tight but it will come up with a small ratchet and then socket or wrench. The caliper comes off, take that, just left it up here for now. Now, your brake pads, it will just come right out. You'll need your pry bar and I got it right out. Now, you can see that rotor is still blocked by this bracket. To get the bracket off, it's two bolts, one here, one here. What I'm finding the best is a 13/16", 21 millimeters looks like is a little too big. It's kind of odd that they go back and forth between standard and metric.
When these bolts are done, you'll either want a breaker bar like this or you could just have a ratchet and a piece of pipe, put it under your ratchet or your breaker bar, give yourself an extra leverage and loosen up the bolts. Just be careful when you do this, you'd pull nicely so it doesn't jerk. I mean, you're putting not much torque on it. You don't want to pull off the bolt. After showing you how to do the leverage, I just cheat and use the impact wrench anyways. I'm going to spray the rotor with tons of penetrate. Hopefully, it's getting there. On your vehicle, you maybe want to do this, just sit it overnight and come back on the back side of the rotor and the hub. Pull out the big gun.
You probably noticed the shiny, new hub there. I did do this brake video along with a couple of other repairs. If you like to see the other steps involved in replacing that hub, then just check out our other videos. You go on nicely. I would just take a lug nut. Just sort of somewhat hold on there while I put the brakes together. This is the bracket that the caliper bolt too is on and has a stainless steel slide here. This one will take a wire brush to clean those off real good.
Now, we have two lug bolts, 13/16", just put the bracket on like that. Just a reminder, the bracket goes on the disc side and the bolts go in. I'm going to tighten these bolts a little bit. Made my tool crunch and tighten it to 110 pounds. Now, I'm just going to wipe rotors down, just a little bit of Mineral Spirits here, just to make sure there's nothing on, Mineral Spirits brake cleaner even gasoline as long as it cleans off grease and then evaporate quickly. Okay, my new pads from 1AAuto, exactly the same as the old pads. On here, I assemble around within a minute. It's pretty to put to these on, but what I found was that the brake disc was wobbling around and preventing me so I put another bolt on it and just another, that's all set.
For the next step, you may want to loosen your brake fluid cap a little. When we pried out the caliper, we attempted to reset the pistons. You see the pistons are still slipping out. What we can do is just take an old tab and then a large C-clamp. Then you have the C-clamp to reset pistons, as I tighten the C-clamp, the pistons go further in. Caliper back on just to make sure that these are sliding nice and free. Got to push them all the way that way, and then put this back on. You put the top up in first and then the bottom. You'll now start your 13 millimeter bolts and we'll put these in. Then torque comes to 25 pounds.
Then we'll fast forward through the preliminary tightening of those bolts. I'll fast forward it a little bit here. Remove those two lug nuts that I used to hold the rotor in place, then put the wheel back up on. Hand-thread the lug nuts and then I just tighten them up preliminary with the air wrench. Then, as you lower the vehicle on the ground and then tighten the lug nuts, 120 pounds and you want to create a star pattern as you're torqueing them.
Last very important step, make sure you reset your disk brakes by pumping them and then before you road test, you stop from 5 and 10 miles an hour just to make sure your vehicle just stop before you enter the roadway.
We hope this 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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Okay, friends, one of the first things we need to do is safely raise and support the vehicle. We're going to remove all of our lug nuts and take the wheel off. Now that the wheel's off, the next thing we need to do is access to the caliper slider mounting bolts here, remove the pair. Let's go ahead and get the caliper off of here. There we are. Remove the caliper. And now you want to take a look at this area right here. This is where the piston boots are. If you see any fluid, you know the calipers is no good. Put the caliper up onto the control arm here. Now, I'm going to use a caliper depression tool that pushes back both the pistons at the same time. Awesome. Check your pistons, make sure that they're not leaking. This looks perfect. Now, we're just going to take a little bit of caliper lubricant. We're going to go right along these actual pistons here on the caliper. There we are. That looks decent. And now along all three of the ears. And let's set this aside. Now, let's remove the pads. Now, let's remove the caliper bracket by removing these two bolts. Remove the rotor. Now, we need to clean up the mating surface of the hub, so that way there when we put on a new rotor, it's going to be nice and clean.
So, now let's make our way over to a workbench so we can start cleaning up our bracket here. If you were to look at it, you're going to see these areas right here. These are your sliders. Sometimes there'll be frozen in the bracket and you'll have to work at getting them apart. Other times you can kind of grab onto it, give it a twist and separate it like that. Once you've done that, we're going to continue on by removing the boot. Take it apart. Just like that. Set it aside to its corresponding side. This one is a little sticky, but it comes right out. Slide that off as well. At this point, you want to look at your caliper sliders. Look all up along this area right here. If you see any debris or it looks like it's rusted or rotted in any way, that could, of course, cause this to not slide. So, you need to clean them both up. Let's do that now. Now that the sliders are done, let's go ahead and clean our boots. Just take a nice rag. Slide it through. Just like that. Now we'll open it up, just kind of run it like this. Just drag your hands right across it. That's going to get out the majority of the junk that's inside there. Take a nice peek. Make sure it looks like it's in good condition. Do the same to the other.
Now that we have those done, let's go ahead and put this over a nice collection bucket. Put some parts cleaner inside each of these ports. Now, let's use a nice little bore brush and clean them out. Get that out. Oh yeah, that's nasty. You might have to do that a couple of times. Now, looking along this area of the ports, you might see that there's some buildup. You need to clean that off as well. That's where the boot's gonna ride and it needs to be clean. Those look great. Let's move along to these areas right here, that's where your pads are gonna ride. There we are. Now that we have all four corners, nice and clean, let's just apply a thin coating of grease across them. This is going to help keep moisture away. Now it's going to be time to continue by lubing our sliders. Take some of that grease, go along the entire shaft of the slider ad then all the way up along that little ridge where the boot's going to ride, that's going to be very important.
Let's do the same along the ridge on the caliper bracket where the boot's going to ride. Also important. Take your slider boot, slide it onto the slider. Just like that. Give it a nice spin, that works all the grease in there. Slide it into your caliper bracket, put the boot so it's sitting on the lip all the way around, a nice spin. Clean up your mess, and then do the same to the other side. It's important to make sure you clean up the braking surface on your new rotors. Before we go ahead and put our rotor on there, let's put a little bit of copper never-seize on the hub itself. Let's get the rotor on. The next thing we need to do is get our bracket on here. To do that, you want to make sure your bolts are clean and, of course, a little bit of red thread locker on there. Start them both in and then we'll snug them up and torque them to manufacturer specifications. Now, let's torque these to 130 foot-pounds. Now it's going to be time to install our pads. But before we can do that, we need to make sure that we put a little bit of lube along the ears of the pad, and then we need to install our little tins that came in the pack.
Looking at the tins, what you're going to see is they have a little ear that comes off. That ear needs to face out towards the back of the pad. Just like this. Do the same to all ears. I'll get the pads on there. As you push it in, you might notice that when you release, it tries to pull away. That's because of those tabs. Just kind of hold it in there so it can't fall. Let's grab our caliper, bring it around, slide it up on here. There we are. Two calipers slider bolts, start them both in, and then we're going to snug them up and torque them to 24 foot-pounds. Okay. Let's torque them. Let's get our wheel back on here. Start all your lug nuts on there and torque them to 130 foot-pounds. Torqued. Okay, friends, so now all you want to do is go ahead and pump up those brakes so they're nice and firm, check your brake fluid, and then take it for a road test.
