Soft Brakes Pedal to the Floor 5 Common Car Brake Problems to Check

Do you have a brake pedal that doesn't feel right? It's soft or squishy? That's what we're going to talk about in this video. Whether you have a squishy brake pedal, spongy, or even the pedal basically goes to the floor, the first thing we want to check is the brake fluid level. Find the master cylinder and the reservoir, make sure the fluid is up to the proper level. Most vehicles will have a max line and a minimum line. And sometimes you just shake the reservoir a little bit and you can see the fluid in there.

If the fluid level is low, that's a good indication that something's wrong. But if the fluid level is not low, you still want to check for leaks and make sure there's no leaks in the system. So look around the master cylinder, see if there's any fluid in this area. And then also check the brake hoses and lines. Well, underneath the vehicle, we want to look at all these brake lines and just make sure none of them look extremely corroded or rusty and are leaking fluid. So just go around the entire vehicle and check them out.

And the brake hoses, if you look at the hoses, make sure there's no fluid on the hoses. Nothing should be seeping out. And also the caliper, take a look at the caliper. See if anything's leaking from any of the calipers. Everything looks dry here. You want to check out the calipers, make sure that there's no fluid leaking. Even at the little dust boot, if you see a little moisture on there, the caliper is going to have to be replaced. Sometimes it'll be obvious that the caliper is soaked and it needs to be replaced, but sometimes it's not so obvious. So double-check those dust boots or replace those calipers.

If you have rear drum brakes, what you're going to need to do is take the drums off, inspect the wheel cylinder, make sure the wheel cylinder is not leaking. If it is, it's going to have to be replaced. Also, while you have the drums off, check the pad lining, see if the shoes are worn. If those are worn, those can cause a squishy pedal. And also if they're not adjusted properly, they can cause the pedal to feel squishy.

We're going to check all the calipers and the brake pads. Take a straight blade screwdriver and just try to compress the caliper a little bit. Just do it nice and slow. And with that compressed, just make sure the calipers slide...slides back and forth. So we're basically checking to make sure these are not frozen right here and that's working properly. And then the brake pads, make sure the brake pads are not frozen to the caliper bracket because those can give you a funny feeling pedal. Those look good. If you see on the front, if I tried to pry this caliper over this top slide works perfectly fine but this lower one is frozen. It's not moving at all.

So this bracket, you can try to retrieve this slide out of the bracket but a lot of times the brackets need to be replaced. Check and make sure the brake caliper pistons are all compressing. You can get all the pistons to go back into the calipers. And if you look at any of the rotors and you have excessive rust, sometimes they'll be worse than this. And if you see that, that's because the pads are not making good contact surface with the rotor. Be aware that the front of the rotor may look perfectly fine, but the back could be rusty and not making good contact.

In this case, you're going to have to replace the rotors and the pads and make sure everything's sliding properly on the caliper. Another reason why your brake fluid could be low is because all your brake pads are extremely thin and most of the fluid is going to be in all the calipers. You could also have air in your brake system. And the only way to get that air out is to bleed the brakes. Now, if you didn't find any leaks in any of those locations, your master cylinder could actually be leaking fluid into the brake booster.

The only way to check for that is to either take the master cylinder off the brake booster or take the vacuum hose off and either slide a long zip tie down there or something that you can see if there's fluid in there or even a borescope and see if you see any fluid in there. If there is fluid in there, you need to replace the brake booster and the master cylinder. Another problem you could have is internally in the master cylinder, it's not compressing the fluid right and giving you that squishy brake pedal feel.

That's what you want to check out if you have a squishy brake pedal. I hope this video helped you out and you enjoyed it. If you did, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring the bell, and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.