How to Replace Brake Caliper and Hose 2000-04 Ford Focus

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2001 Ford Focus and I want to show you how to replace a front caliper and flex hose. It's going to be a very easy job and I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, friends. So we've got the vehicle supported under all its lift points. We're going to bring the vehicle up a little bit, try to keep the wheel so it's just barely touching the ground. We're going to break free the lug nuts: 19 millimeter. If you're going to be using an air gun you really shouldn't have to do this, but if you're using a ratchet you want to do it with the wheels still touching the ground. Now that they're loose we can raise the vehicle and we'll get busy.

So here we go. Time to get the wheel off. Use Your Ratchet, use your air gun, use your 19: whatever you're doing. I'm going to take off the last one. I'm going to hold the wheel. It's nice and corroded on there. Just put one of these lug nuts back on. Just going to give this a little bonk, see if we can get it to break free. It feels like a no. Okay. Something else that we can try doing ... just grab a pry bar, or you can use a rubber mallet if you wanted to. I use a pry bar and I just come from the backside, probably up against the lower control arm in the wheel, use a little leverage, break it free. Easy peasy. Some people might try to use a hammer: you could dent wheel. Rubber mallet could work. Alright, we removed the wheel. Now we have a clear view of what we're working on.

Okay, so what we're going to do now is we're going to take the caliper bolts out. We've got one bolt right there and one down here: slider bolts. It's a seven millimeter Allen head. It looks something like that. Okay. Slider bolt number two, same as the first. You don't have to worry about mixing them up. You can see that there's a little clip right here. The way that this clip works is you actually have to grab this side and draw it out and away from the caliper right there. Okay, so grab wherever you need to just, try to go like that. Do the same for the other side. Take your pry bar, take that off. Easy peasy.

Let's get these pads out of here. We can take a look at what they look like. This one right here, completely missing all of its pad material. That's what it should look like. Okay? To get it out all I'm going to do, I'm going to pull this up over that. Pull this one up over this, just like that. I'm going to give this side of bonk. There we are. It's broken free. We'll set this aside.

Inner pad, scrip it, pull it right out. This is where the piston rides. If you're not replacing your caliper, you already have it pushed back hopefully at this point, just take a peek, make sure you don't see any fluid coming out from around here. If you see any fluid coming out you need to replace your caliber. We have our 11 millimeter flare head wrench. It goes right on here. Okay. 11 millimeter. I'm going to take a little bit of a penetrant spray, spray that on there. Let it do its job for a second, probably the longer the better. Maybe I should have sprayed it earlier. I'm just going to see if I can get this to break free. It looks like not so much. I'm bending the bracket, so I'm going to try something a little different here.

Okay, so I'm going to take my 11 millimeter, I'm going to try to loosen this up. When I try to loosen it, it's just going to bend this bracket a little bit. So I'm going to take some locking pliers. I'm replacing this flex hose. That's the reason for doing this. If you're not replacing the flex hose, you do not need to touch this. There we are. We'll just get it moving a little bit. I'll let you just keep going back and forth. Now I'm just going to make sure it's snug and we can move along.

Okay, so now it's time to prep our caliper. These right here are the caliper sliders. They need to be able to slide freely. They should be greased. This doesn't feel like it has any grease on it yet, so it's ready to be prepped. If you're using your old calipers and these are rusted or rotted, you're going to want to make sure that you clean them up so they're a nice smooth surface, and then of course put some lube. I'll show you what I'm talking about. I have a little bit of caliper grease here. Okay.

All you're going to do, try to get a little bit right in that boot right there. You can even put it directly on the slider if you want. It's completely up to you. It might be a little bit easier to do it on the slider, but then of course you know you're going to get it all over your hands, so that's something to think about. So I'll just leave that like that. Now I'm going to take these, I'm just going to drive them through, get it slipping. Sounds good. Nice and lubed. Same thing for this one. Either way I guess we get the grease all over our hands, no avoiding that. Cool.

Next thing you want to do, take some more of your caliper grease ... First I'm going to clean this off. Take some more of your caliper grease. You're going to go right around the piston right here. This is the muscle of the caliper. When you step on your brake, it forces fluid into this channel right here in which turn pushes it out this piston, squeezes the pad up against the rotor. Once the inner pad's hitting against the rotor, it makes the caliper slide a little bit on these sliders and then it presses the outer pad against your rotor, causes friction, makes your vehicle stop. I'm going to put some right along here. The reason why I'm putting this on there, it's going to help with vibration dampening and noise reduction. It's kind of like a little buffer we'll say.

Some people will say you can just put the grease all over the whole back of the pad. I don't personally think that you need to do that. The reason for that is because that's just more area for dirt and crud to get stuck onto there, so I don't need that. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take these little ears, I'm going to slide them in. Sometimes you just have to squeeze them a little bit and press. There we are. Make sure you don't get any grease on your friction material if you can avoid it. If you do, just use some parts cleaner. We've got our other pad, this one right here, it's just going to go right on here. Okay ... show you what we're doing. Take the slider, push those back so they're ready. The threaded areas are going to screw into here, so you want to make sure that you have these sliders pushed in. Okay.

Take our outer pad, I'm just going to get it on here ... put that down on my cart for a second ... just like that. Pull up on that bar. Take our caliper, I'm just going to slide it right over. There we are.

Now this clip is going to be a little difficult. You're going to want to make sure you're wearing your safety glasses of course. Take a pry bar, or if you need to use a screwdriver ... whatever you need to do, you do you booboo. I'm just going to take this, bring it so it comes up and over that way, and it sits inside this channel right here. Once it's in that channel, you should have an ear up against the backside of your hub assembly ... sorry, your knuckle assembly, and you should have one down here. That locks your caliper in. It's really not going anywhere at this point. We still have to tighten these up: your caliper sliders on the backside. I'm going to grab my tool. I have a seven millimeter Allen head. I'm going to use that to tighten this down.

I'm going to leave that like that for a second. I'll go back to tightening that up in one second. I just want to make sure that I have this one started as well so I can still move the caliper around if I need to. All right, we've got both of them started. Tighten that up. That's nice and tight, tight. Boo yeah. We can move ahead.

So this little rubber plug right here, you're just going to take this, pop it right out of there. You can reuse this. That's going to go right on your bleeder screw when we're done. Just a little bleeder screw cover ... we'll set it aside. I've got my flex hose, brand new, I'm just going to take it, I'm going to thread it right into the caliper. There we are. Okay. It feels like it stopped. I'm going to use my 17 millimeter wrench ... it feels like it's pretty snug. Perfect. Now what we're going to do, we're going to grab a collection bucket, we'll have it underneath us, we're going to loosen this up with our 11 millimeter. We already broke it free.

This is a little clip right here. This just slides into the slot on the flex hose, so the flex hose is going to sit in here like this and then the clip that I just indicated is going to sit in that slot. This line right here screws up into this. Once it's in, then we're going to take this and slide it right in there. So right here is a clip. We're just going to grab some pliers, try to grab onto that clip, wiggle it, it should want to pull right out. I'll show you what it looks like here. Come on baby ... almost there. Ah yeah.

So that's what the clip looks like. Okay? It's just a U, it slides right in like this and it sits inside the groove just like that. Okay, so you want to make sure you have everything ready now. We've got our bucket under there. Once we break this line free fluids going to start coming out due to gravity. As the fluid comes out, it's going to go onto the end of the collection receptacle down there. You don't want to wait too long having this open, because if you lose all the fluid inside your master cylinder you're going to end up having some break problems. You're going to have to bleed it out. It's a pain in the butt. So here we go. I'm going to take my 11 millimeter and try to turn this out.

Okay, we got some brake fluid coming out. You want to make sure you're wearing hand protection, eye protection. You don't want this stuff on your skin, especially in your eyes. If you do happen to get it on either make sure you wash it as soon as possible. Okay. We'll get this out of the way. Here we have our line. You can check the threads. It looks good. Let me get this lined up. Now I'm going to try to turn this in. Hopefully I can get it started fairly quickly here. Okay. It's threading in nice and easy, that's always nice. Snug it up. Perfect. If you happen to have any brake fluid on your hands now is the time to get it off. At this point we're not in much of a rush. I say we're clean enough. We've got our clip. This just slides right in and it's going to sit in that slot that I showed you before. You can give it a couple bonks.

It's nice and locked in. That line's not going anywhere. We'll take our hose, I'm just going to bring it over, it's going to slide right into this bracket right there. There we are. Now we're clear to pump up the brakes and bleed out the caliper.

Okay. Now that we have this side together, you're going to go over and do the same to the other side of the vehicle, right? Then you're going to go ahead, check your master cylinder fluid. Your master cylinder's right here. You want to top that off with fluid, make sure it's nice and full, and then you're going to go ahead and start bleeding the brakes. You can watch the video on how to do that.

Basically you're just going to pump up the break, give it like three to five nice slow pumps, let it sit for a second. You can come out here, open up this bleeder screw. It's an eight millimeter. Let it trickle out. You want to see no more air bubbles coming out. When you have regular just solid fluid close it up. Go ahead and pump it again. It's always good if you have an extra person. You can have somebody in there doing the pumping, holding the brake pedal for you while you open it. Okay? There's a bleed sequence for that. Or you can go on OneAAuto.com and get the self bleeding kit and watch the video on that. It's very simple. So let's continue.

I'm going to use my eight millimeter. I'm going to loosen up this bleeder screw. There we are. We're going to let it do its thing for a second here. The fluid's going to take a little while because the ... you know, we replaced the flex hose and the caliper of course, so it could take a minute for the fluid to start coming out. If you have vacuum leader you could help it along with that. Not Everybody has access to that so I'm not going to worry about that for this video. There we go. So we got the fluid trickling out of here. If you a shake the hose around a little bit sometimes you can get a little extra air. And also give the caliper a couple little bonks.

So this is called gravity bleeding at this point. I would say we've got a pretty good trickle going. We can go ahead and close this up, and at this point you would want to continue with a regular bleed. Now that we've got this bled, I'm just going to clean it off a little bit. I've got my little boot, right? We took this out of the hole in the caliper. I'm just going to slide it over that. That covers up the inside hole in there, prevents moisture from getting in and freezing up. What happens is is moisture gets in, starts corroding in between the bleeder screw and the caliper. You go to open up your caliper bleeder and it breaks. So that's just going to help protect it. We're clear to move along.

Let's take off that stabilizing lug nut that we throw on there. Okay, we'll grab our wheel, bring it over, just going to lift it right up with our leg, use our ab muscles, hold the wheel, put our lug nut back on here. I'm going to grab the other three. Time to go ahead and tighten up these lug nuts: 100 foot pounds. We're going to go in a crisscross pattern, never around in a circle. Let's do it again. Tight.

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