How to Replace Brakes 2001-10 Chrysler PT Cruiser

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'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years 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 remove and replace the front brakes on this PT Cruiser. Actually found that it already had new brakes, so I'm just going to show you taking them apart and putting them back together. Rest assured that the brakes you can buy at 1A Auto are of good quality. This procedure is the same as any '01 to 2010 PT Cruiser. The tools you'll need are either a 19-mm socket with a ratchet or your tire iron, jack and jack stands, 12-mm and 18-mm wrenches or sockets with ratchets. You'll either need a breaker bar or pipe for some extra leverage, or I should say you may need that. You may be able to get your bolts all apart with just regular tools. Then you'll need a hammer. This is the tools for the 2001. Some of the later years may use slightly different sizes for some of the bolts. Your 19-mm socket. If you don't have the benefit of impact tools, you want to have your vehicle on the ground, loosen the lug nuts first and then remove them. We'll just speed it up here as we take the rest of those lug nuts off and remove the wheel. You can see our brakes, I'm spinning the rotor here. It looks like the brakes on this vehicle are brand new.

So I'm not going to replace them, but I am going to show you how to take them apart and put them back together so you can replace them if you need to. Start by removing these two 12-mm bolts. They should not be too tight. You should be able to get them with a regular ratchet. I'm going to just hit a little fast forward again as we remove those 12-mm bolts. Once you have those off, pull your caliper. You might need to pull it out some to release it. The caliper comes up and off and you can put it up here. Now you can see your brake pads. They just pull right out. Like I said, you can see these are basically brand new, so we don't need to replace them. Now you need to remove this whole bracket to get your rotor off. There's two bolts right here. These are 18-mm bolts and they should be somewhat tighter than the smaller bolts. What you can do here is slip a piece of pipe onto your ratchet. It gives you some more leverage. Pull down nice and slow. That comes off. If you have some trouble getting these rotors off, you can sometimes take a hammer like this and believe it or not, that usually pops right off. Before we put things back together, wire brush this to clean it out a little bit here. You can put some oil or penetrating oil. This is a little bit of anti-seize. This makes it so that next time somebody wants to get this apart, it will be easy.

Assembly, just like taking it apart. Note on these rotors, the way to check your rotors basically... You can see this is basically a new rotor. There's a little bit of a ridge here. The surface and then a little diagonal and then straight over. If this diagonal is missing, that means your rotor is probably too thin. Also you can check, just take the back of your fingernail and run it along the rotor surface. If you detect any real deep grooves, you're going to feel a little bit of imperfection, but really deep grooves and you probably want to replace your rotors as well. Once the rotor's on, I like to just take a lug nut, put it on here, just helps keep things in place a little bit. Here's your bracket. You want to take a wire brush and clean off these stainless steel slides. Your bracket goes on the disk side. Start a bolt in, and another bolt. We'll just speed this up here as I tighten those up. You want to torque those bolts between 85 and 90 foot-pounds. The brake pads, these are the existing brake pads. The brake pads we sell at 1A Auto are a nice high quality. They don't make noise.

I'm just putting these ones back in because they're brand new, basically. Before you go to mount your caliper, make sure that these slide back and forth nice and easy and free. If they don't, you pull them out, clean them and grease them. If the brakes are worn out, the piston of your caliper here is going to be pushed out. You want to use a large C-clamp and push that piston back in. With that piston pushed back in, the caliper will go right down. You might have to reach in and push your sliding tabs back a little bit. Tuck these bolts in. The pads have little springs on them just to kind of keep them seated. You want to tighten these bolts only to about 18 to 20 foot-pounds. That's not a lot because they don't do much except keep the caliper in place. What really absorbs most of the pressure is this big bracket, which you tightened to 80 to 90 foot-pounds. Remove this lug nut. Now here we're going to speed through putting the tire back on. Make sure you thread each lug nut on by hand first so you don't cross thread them. Then I just use my impact wrench just to preliminarily tighten them down. I'll torque them once I get it on the ground. So here it is on the ground. I'm going to torque these lug nuts to 90 foot-pounds. I'm going to use kind of a star pattern. This is not the last step, stay tuned. Whenever you do brake work always make sure you pump your brakes a bunch of times, then do a test stop from like 5 miles an hour before doing a road test.

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.