2017 Subaru BRZ Front Ceramic Brake Pads TRQ BFA73445

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, we're working on a 2013 Subaru Outback. We're going to be doing a front brake job. It's going to be very easy. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need these or any other quality part, you can always check us out down at 1aauto.com. Thanks.

All right, friends. One of the first things that we're going to have to do is we're going to have to make sure that we loosen up all five of these lug nuts. We don't want them very loose, we just want them to be broken free so we can take them off once we get the vehicle up. The reason for doing it while the vehicle is semi-supported on the ground but still most of the weight is off of the tire but still touching is just so when I'm going to loosen this with my 19 millimeter socket, and I go to the left, I'm not going to be spinning the wheel in the air. Right?

We're just going to get them loose. Like I said, you don't want to take them all the way out, you don't want them super loose. Because if the wheel can move around, you might damage your aluminum wheel, you might damage your studs that are underneath there. You might basically just cause damage that you don't want to cause. All right? So we're going to do this. We're going to do that to all the lug nuts that we're going to be taking the wheels off of and we'll move along.

Now we're going to raise and support the vehicle. We're using a two post lift. You can use something like a jack and some jack stands. All right. Got the majority of these lug nuts off. I'm holding the wheel so it doesn't fall off. I'm turning my 19 millimeter lug nut to the left. There it is in there. Grab my wheel, lower it to the ground, and I'll put it out of the way.

Now we've got the wheel off. We're going to go ahead and remove our bleeder screw cover right here. It needs a small pocket screwdriver, just going to try to pull it off. You can use whatever you have access to. There we are, little cover. Set it aside someplace where we won't lose it. Those things are like gold. I'm going to use my 10 millimeter. Just using a wrench, you can use a socket if you want. I'm going to go to the left, which is counter clockwise.

Break it free. Watch for a trickle of fluid. That lets me know that the bleeder screw is actually open. I'm going to close it right back off. Perfect. So now that we know that opens up, I can either try pushing the caliper back while it's still on the vehicle or I can use a caliper depression tool. It's a little bit easier with dual piston calipers so just do it while it's on the vehicle.

So I'm going to grab a little bleeder screw hose. I'm going to run it down to a recycling receptacle. I'm going to put it down there, I'll open this back up. I'll use a small pry bar, I'm going to go between the caliper and the rotor, try to pull the caliper in this direction, which will in turn push these pistons in to the point that they're bottomed out. Then I'll go ahead and move ahead to taking off these caliper mounting bolts.

I've got my hose, just goes down to my recycling receptacle down there. I'm going to put it right on the bleeder screw, I'm going to hold it on. I'm going to turn my 10 millimeter wrench, once again, counterclockwise to open it up. I'm going to take my small pry bar, or if you have access to a screwdriver, whatever you want to use. You're going to go through the slots in your caliper, try to get it up against the rotor, and then we're just going to try to pry away.

Right now, the caliper's moving. You can see fluid coming down. Okay. Where I'm working up close to my face like this, I'm going to want to be careful not to punch myself in the face. I'm kind of like Tyson, I don't want to knock myself out, that kind of guy. Right? Here we go. Just going to get it in there, see what I can do. Essentially, what we're trying to do though is just push those pistons back as far as they can go. Here we go.

So the caliper can move around quite a bit. I'm just going to push it in that direction now. I'm going to see about just going directly against the pistons. It's kind of hard to see, I'm sure, from your angle. I'll show you once I get the caliper off what I actually physically did under there. Just go here. I'm being very careful not to try to poke up against any boots that are in there. You don't want to damage any of your caliper boots. That feels pretty good.

I'll just give it one second to let any air that I might have pushed up in there just to burp its way out. It's going to come down the tube. I don't need to wait for too long because I'm going to end up bleeding this out in the end anyway. So that seems pretty good. Let's close it off, get my wrench off of there, and make sure all my fluid gets down into my hose, nothing gets on the floor or the ground or whatever you're working under, my eyes.

I'll set this aside. All right, so I got myself a little caliper hook. I want to make sure that I have this ready in that hand so I can hold my caliper. I'm just going to hold it up someplace on maybe my strut basically so my caliper isn't hanging on the hose and putting a tug on my hose. I don't want to put any tears or rips or tugs, anything that might cause a bubble or damage to this. Your brake system's high pressure. If you end up messing up your hose, you see a little crack or anything like that or a bubble, usually you'll see bubbles along where the metal meets on, just replace the hose for safety's sake, okay?

To move along, I'm going to remove this bolt right here and this one right here using a 14 millimeter. You can use a wrench or a socket. A wrench is going to be much easier in this area. So I'm going to start with the bottom first. When I take it out, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to leave it in a couple threads though. Okay? So I'm going to take it almost all the way out. It's nice and loose now. I'll leave it like that.

I'm going to come up here, I'm going to do this one. Here we are. Okay. I'm going to hold my caliper so it can't go anywhere. Now I can remove my caliper bolt. These bolts right here hold your caliper to the sliders. Some people might call them caliper slider bolts. That's what they look like. They're both the same. You don't have to worry about mixing them up. I'm going to grab my caliper, pull it off. I'll show you what I was doing.

Here's your caliper pistons, okay? When you step on your brake, it forces fluid through the brake hose right here and into your caliper. In turn, it goes through these, it pushes fluid out into the pistons, which then in turn squeeze these brake pads up against your rotor, causing friction and causing your vehicle to stop or slow.

I'm just going to go ahead and hang this up here. Actually, let's talk about something real quick. Since we're here and we're looking at it, you want to make sure that there's no moisture coming out from in between that piston and this boot and there's no rips or cracks or anything crazy going on there. This one looks good. I'd say we can go ahead and hang this up and out of the way for now. We'll move along.

We're going to take off a caliper bracket bolt there, caliper bracket bolt there. Okay, we'll get those right out of the way. Once we start them out, we'll leave them in just a little bit and we'll remove the other one completely and then this one, just like we did before. Okay? You don't want to remove it all the way and then try to do this one and try to hold everything. It's going to be hard. Just leave it in a little bit. It's going to save you a little bit of hassle.

I got my 17 millimeter wrench. Okay? What I'm going to do is I'm just going to give it a little bonk with my rubber mallet, just like that. There we are. I could try to use my fist, risk hurting myself. Let's work smarter. You could also use an air gun if you had something like that. A lot of people do, but some people don't. So for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to go ahead and do it caveman style.

I'm going to use my 17 on the top now, same thing. I've got my safety glasses on. Here we are, nice and loose. This one, nice and loose. Cool. I'm going to put away my wrench. I'm going to grab the bolt that's hardest to get to. I'll take that one out first while I'm holding my caliper bracket. Come on. There it is. I'm still holding my caliper bracket so it can't fall down, hit me in the foot. You'll notice there's a lot of fluid here. This is just penetrant spray. So there's our caliper bracket.

Okay, friends. So now we're going to go ahead and take off our brake rotor. This is part of our friction material, right? We've got our pads that squeeze on this. This is the rotor, okay? It's heavy duty metal. Bing, bing, bing. It's going to be super heavy. What we might have to do if this doesn't want to break free from the hub that's underneath there, we're going to have to either whack it with a hammer if we're replacing it or if we're not replacing it, we definitely don't want to whack it with a hammer, right?

We're just going to use a little bolt right there. You can find the right thread pitch and everything, screw it in there, and that'll press up against the hub that's behind there and screw into the threads and the rotor and push the rotor away from the hub. For this, we're actually just going to be replacing the rotor anyway.

So what I like to do is grab one of our lug nuts. It's nothing special, it's just one that came off the vehicle, and I put it on a few threads, even a couple more than that just in case. I'm going to take a little bit of penetrant, wearing my safety glasses in case anything comes back, tries to shoot me in the face. Worst case scenario, it gets in my beard. It's horrible, but I can live.

Okay, I got penetrant in there. It's all going to soak in for a second. Like I said, we're assuming that we're replacing this rotor, okay? So we're not worried about the condition about it when we're done. So now I'm going to use my big fabulous hammer and I'm going to give it a couple whacks. This rotor's garbage so I don't have to worry about trying to make sure that I hit just around here just in case because I don't want to damage this. This rotor's garbage. I'm going to whack as far out as possible for the most amount of leverage as possible. Okay?

So I'm just going to go right around here. I'm going to try to stay away from these lug studs right here because if I'm swinging and I'm trying to hit right here somehow, I might be pretty good, but there's pretty good odds that I might nick this thing.

If I nick this thing, I bend over the threads, well, you're probably either going to replace the bearing or you're going to have to go down and you're going to have to get yourself a new lug stud and figure out how to put that in. Or you might even be lucky enough that you can just chase the threads if it's not too damaged. Let's skip right over that. We're just going to hit right here because we're replacing these rotors.

So I'm wearing my safety glasses, wearing my hand safety as well. I'm going to go ahead and whack it just like that, nice and light. I'm going to hold my rotor so it can't fall off and hurt me. Remove this lug nut. I'm just going to try to work it off. There's going to be some rust and rot behind there, as you can tell. Everything's falling out. You're going to have to just keep going back and forth. If for some reason it didn't want to come any further, you're having a super hard time, you're getting irritated, just take your hammer, come from the back side.

So there we go. Rotor's off. As you can tell by the condition of this rotor, it's not the best quality. I know that I just whacked it on this side, but we'll just pretend that didn't happen. We just want to inspect the rotor. It's not very good quality. I would want to replace this with a quality 1A Auto part.

Here we have an old rotor from a 2013 Subaru Outback. As you can tell, it's not in the best condition. It's seen better days. It's got a lot of rust flaking up here. This cuts into the pads, it causes uneven wearing. As you can tell right along here, it's also going to cause noise. You can also tell where the pad is right inside the brackets.

There's a lot of rust. That could cause those to get caught inside the brackets, which would cause excessive heat on the braking material because basically, if these are stuck in the brackets, they're not being able to release from the brake. So they're just going to continue riding on the rotor, which will cause this to heat up. Eventually, you'll get a brake pulsation.

Judging by the look of this rotor, this person already had a brake pulsation. All these spots right here are just hot spots. So basically, once this rotor heats up, things start to expand. Right? When they get hot they expand. These are going to expand more than other areas. So as they step on the brake, the pads are going to squish up against the rotor, they're going to do their job, squeeze real hard, right?

Then it's going to cause these to heat up, they're going to expand. Every time this comes around and hits up against the pad, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. They're going to feel it in their steering wheel. If this is a front brake rotor, which it is, you'll feel it in the steering wheel. If it was a rear rotor, you'd feel it in the seat. So we'll put that aside. We'll just talk about this stuff over here.

This is brand new quality 1A Auto parts right here. You can't get much better than this. As you can tell, the pads are in great condition. They're brand new so of course they're in great condition, brake condition. We've got ceramic pads. That's what this application calls for so that's what we've got. We've got drilled and slotted rotors. This is great for heat dissipation and dust dissipation as well.

Both sides are like that, so that's wonderful. As you're braking, it's going to have a chance to cool down. All right? It's very important. You want your brakes to get hot as you're braking and then you want them to cool down when you're not. So as you can tell, this is a quality part right here. So if you need this part or any other part, you can always click onto 1aauto.com. Thanks.

Okay everybody, we've got our caliper bracket. Now it's time to get to cleaning, all right? Your mother always told you you got to clean up your mess. Let's clean up this mess. We're going to take out our caliper sliders. We're just going to grab it by the boot, give it a little twist, pull it right out. This one has a little rubber boot on it. Okay?

So we want to make sure that one goes back in the same hole that we got it from. It might be easier to go like this and just throw it down, throw that one down in a pile too. We don't want to mix them up. This one we're going to put over here, do the same thing with this one. Check them out, pretty nasty and dirty. We'll clean those up in a minute. That one goes over here, this one goes over here, easy to remember.

Now while it's apart like this, I want to make sure that I'm wearing my safety glasses and my hand protection because I'm going to be using a chemical at this point. I'm going to spray inside this hole. If you have access to a straw, maybe this one came with it and it did. I'm just going to throw it on there real quick, making sure I'm not aiming at my face, of course. There we are.

Okay. Aiming away from my face, I'm going to try to spray into this hole. As I spray in, stuff is going to want to come out. All right? That's why I didn't want to have my face there. Last thing I want to do is get that in my eyes, my mouth, my anything really. Okay? I'm going to let that sit in there for a second, just a little bit of parts cleaner. It's going to eat away at that lube and gunk that's all inside there. Hopefully we'll get it cleaned up nice.

We're going to use something like this. It's a boar brush. I'm just going to put it in there. I'm going to power it up and it's going to spin and clean it all out, okay? That's what I'm going to do. Okay? We'll do the same thing to the other one. Nice. We're going to go over our recycling receptacle, put it in here. I'm going to spray a little bit more, away from my face. There we are. Let's clean that out. It's a new can so it had extra power behind it. Nice.

Okay? We'll take a look inside. As long as they look nice and clean in there, you don't see any more gunk, it should be good enough. I'm going to remove our bucket, get it away from my face so I don't have to breathe in those vapors. There's two different tins on these brackets. We've got one tin that has these right here and one tin that does not. So when we put this back together, we want to put it back the exact way that we took it off. Okay?

Does not have it, does have it. Here we go. Okay? We're cruising along. If you wanted to make your bracket nice and shiny and clean, you can go ahead and use a rag, some more of your parts cleaner. Make it all shiny and red or however this person wanted it to look. That's up to you or whoever is doing the job. It's their prerogative. It's really up to you how good you want it to look. I'll clean it up so it looks fairly decent, but I'm not too worried about that.

Let's move onto the important stuff. Right inside here is where these tins are going to ride. Okay? It just goes in here like that. So what happens is in between there and the tin, moisture and dirt and crud, and well if you live in New England, God knows what gets inside there. Starts to corrode, starts to lift up the tin, your pads get stuck in your brackets, your pads get stuck in the brackets. Warm up your rotors, you have an overheating condition. You just wasted all this time doing a brake job.
So we're going to clean it up. I'm using something like a wire brush. You might have one with a nice long handle. I like it nice and short like this so I just broke it off. Makes it easier for me to hold onto. Some people would prefer it long and that's okay. It's all preference at that point, right? You do you, boo boo. Going to get this cleaned up. Looks pretty decent.

We can go inside here. If you see any big flakes of anything, just clean it up in there too. You don't have to go too crazy in there. Basically, if there was large flakes you'd want to just clean it up so it doesn't hit up against the rotor. Now we'll do the same thing to the other side. Okay? Turn it. Okay, looks pretty good. I'll set that aside. I'm going to grab the tins, got a lot of muck in there. I'll just clean those up.

The odds that you're going to get them perfectly cleaned and nice and shiny, well not so much right? But as long as we try, we do the best we can, who can ask for more? Just try to get it cleaned up, okay? You already got it apart. Here we are. We'll do both sides of them. Here we are. This one looks pretty decent. Like I said, it's not going to be 100% perfect. It looks pretty good. There isn't really any big lips or anything.

If you saw some parts that seemed like they were sticking up quite a bit, just use your pocket screwdriver, you know? Go right along here, try to get out whatever feels like it's lifting up to you. It's your prerogative, it's your car or the car you're working on. Do the best you can for what you got. Okay? Set it aside. We're going to do the same thing to the other one and then we'll move onto the next step of cleaning our pins.

So here we go. I finished cleaning up this tin as good as I could, this one as good as I could. Let's move onto the slider pins. So here's the pin. It's a metal piece. Don't mind that, that's just part of this thing. It's a piece of metal, it's a little shaft. Right? This is just a boot. The boot actually comes off. We can put that right aside. Now we've got the actual pin, so we can take a look at it.

As you can tell, it's pretty rusted going up along here. Let me get the rag out of the way. Sorry. It's rusted going up along here. So what's going to happen is the rust is going to build up, it's going to push this boot away, and it's going to let moisture in. Moisture gets in here, works its way in between your slider and in between your bracket, starts rotting up. Next thing you know, your slider can't move.

So this right here would've caused a major issue going down the road if it went too much further. Moisture would've continued in, we would've have a sticking, not a sticking piston, sorry. A sticking slider situation and we would've had brake pad issues and probably an overheat condition. So here we go. We're going to clean this up the best we can. We can take our clean rag or dirty rag, whatever you got.

I'm just going to try to clean that off. We'll bring our recycling bucket over and use a little bit of parts cleaner, holding it away from my face like always. I'm wearing my gloves so my hands are safe, very important. Safety is key. I'm just going to use my wire brush again, try to clean this up all around there. If the wire brush doesn't do it, you might need a wire wheel. Sorry.

If you don't have access to a wire wheel and your slider pin looks like this when you're done, I would say just try to order some slider pins because this is just going to cause an issue down the line. You're going to end up calling us up and trying to get another set of brakes sooner than you want. So I'm going to bring this over to the wire wheel, get them cleaned up. I'm going to do the same thing to the other one at the same time.

We're going to clean out the inside of these boots. The boots still have a lot of old grease inside there. We want to try and get out as much of that as we can and replace it with new grease. So we'll go clean up the pins and we'll be right back. All right, so I spent a little bit of time. I cleaned these up. In all honesty, it probably wouldn't have worked with something like this.

A little wire brush, I never would've gotten all that off. Judging by the look of this caliper pin right here, you can tell it's pretty pitted. That means that it was pretty rotted, right? The moisture really soaked into that metal. It wreaked havoc on it. If you wanted to, you could go ahead and replace something like this. I think that it should be fine. I think that it would still make a pretty good seal.

So what I would do is I would just make sure that I use plenty of lubricant on it, make sure I get it all the way up to here where the boot's going to be riding. Plenty of lubricant in there. That way, no moisture can make its way in and through and then down into the slider pin and cause havoc. Okay?

So moving on, we're going to clean up our little caliper boots here. All right? This is where the slider rides inside of and it keeps the moisture out of our caliper bracket. An easy way to do this, I'm just going to grab my recycling receptacle again. I've got my parts cleaner, holding it away from my face, spraying there.

Okay. Everything is nice and wet. I'm going to use my little tool again. I'm going to go nice and slow. I don't want to rip this boot. Okay? All I want to do is just get it moving around in there, try to have it break up any grease that's hanging out in there, any dirt and grunge. See? I got it going through. Now I'm going to slow it down, I'm going to try to pull it off. Okay? Set that aside, use this again.

Just squish it. If you're not wearing gloves, do not get any parts cleaner or chemicals on your hands. It's very dangerous for you. Now I'm going to just take my clean rag or clean-ish rag, run it through just like that. I'm just going to take it, rub my boot just like this. That's going to make it touch all up against that rag, hopefully collect as much of that dirty gunk inside there as possible. We'll set this aside so I don't breathe in the fumes anymore.

We can look inside. As long as you get the majority of that out of there, I would say it's pretty good. I'll take a peek. I think it looks pretty darn good, if you ask me. We'll set that aside, we'll do the same thing to the other one, and we can move onto the next step. So here we go, everybody. We've got both of our boots clean, got our pins clean, tins clean, bracket's nice and clean. Let's get ready to lube up.

So we've got our caliper lubrication right here. You can use what you've got. If you've got some kind of silicone paste or whatever, you want to use something that isn't going to dissipate when the brakes heat up though. Okay? You don't want to use Vaseline or whatever. It's basically just going to liquefy. It's going to melt down, just run all along, could get even on your braking material.

So if you use something that melts down, it starts squeezing out, maybe it gets onto here, gets in between your pad and your rotor, you're not going to have great friction, right? So we want to make sure that we have the best friction as possible. So use something that doesn't break down with heat. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go right along all the places where those tins are going to ride. We don't need to use too much.

All we want to do is make sure that it's going to keep the moisture away from the metal. Moisture gets on the metal, it's going to start building up in between the metal of the bracket and the tins. Lift up those tins, hold our pads. Next thing you know, we've got an overheat condition. Let's do it right the first time.

Some people will say you don't necessarily need to do this. That's their prerogative. If you're watching me on the video, this is just the way I do it. Like I said, you don't need to have too much. We don't need to have big globs sticking off of there, anything like that. We just want it to basically look like everything's being coated, okay? I'd say that looks pretty good.

When we go to put our tins back on, we want to make sure that we have lubricant here, which is going to be applied by just sticking it into the bracket. We don't want any lubricant getting on the outside here. The reason for that is because once this is on and the pad's in, if there's lubricant, it's just going to collect brake dust and then your pad's going to probably get stuck in there.

It could collect dirt or debris or anything else you're picking up. Right? At least if it's under here, there's less chances of all that getting accumulated on there. You put it up here, you're just creating a gunky mess. So let's skip right past that mess. We'll put these tins in. Okay?

We'll remember that this one went on this side. We're just putting everything back together the exact way we took it off. We don't need to switch the tins around. Subaru knew the way they wanted to do it when they put it together. So we'll just go with whatever the engineers think, right?

I'm going to take a little bit of the caliper lube again. I'm going to make sure I lube up our tins. I know this stuff looks like it's black, and it is. It's not dirty it's just the type of lubricant that we have here to use. People might say, "Your lubricant's already dirty." It's not, it's just black.

So now I've got this lubricated. I'm just going to put the thin side, slide it all the way up so it sits inside that ridge. I made sure to get my lubricant up inside that ridge like I told you because I want to keep the moisture out of there. If you feel like you want to put a little bit more because you forgot or maybe you weren't really thinking about that, just put a little bit more. That's fine. The more the merrier, at least in this application.

So now we're just going to slide it right up on there. Okay? I'm going to give it a little spin so it's going to work everything together. Very nice. So here we go. Now we're going to continue lubing our caliper slider pin. Put this all on here, paint a nice picture for your mom. There you are, mom. Come like this. I'm going to twist it as I go. Just getting the lubricant, working its way down in there.

All that's going to do is just keep the moisture out, right? Going to keep everything moving nice and smooth. Give it a couple of squishes. Love it. It's perfect. Squish it down, comes back up a little bit. Very nice. If you end up putting too much lubricant down at the end here, when you go to push your pin in, you might notice your pin doesn't go down as far. It might just go to here. You try to push it, it really doesn't go any further. You put too much lubricant.

Well, it could be a minor issue and I would say that it is a minor issue because all we have to do is take our small screwdriver, dig whatever we can out, make sure you put it in a waste receptacle, whatever you're doing to take care of that, not on the ground or your pants. Go like that, get out as much as you can, and then just go ahead and do however much you think that you need to put on there without actually causing that to happen.

So I'm going to go ahead and put a little bit of lubricant on this. This is the one that has all the pitting. It's not the prettiest but it's going to be hidden behind the boot anyway. As long as we have an adequate amount of lubricant there, we shouldn't have to worry about moisture getting past. So here we go, thin side again, going up. Just like this. Give it a little spin. That makes sure the lubricant's worked its whole way around that whole slot there. Okay?

Then go ahead and do this, just lube this puppy right up. Very nice. A little bit there, no big deal. Okay. This one's going in this hole, twisting as we go. Maybe you do want to twist, maybe you don't want to twist. It's what I like to do. Put it on there. You want to make sure you pay special attention to the fact that the boot actually made its way over the lip right here. Okay?

If it didn't make its way over the lip, and for some reason it's sitting out at a lip, down here like that, and you think you got it on there, you're not going to have a good seal. This is going to move around. What's going to happen? Water gets in there. Mother nature. There we are. Those feel pretty good. I'd say we're good to move onto the next step.

So here we go. What I like to do is I like to use a little bit of lubricant here, little bit of anti-seize. Just paint it all over the place, all over the back and plate, you know, whatever. You don't really need to go on the backing plate. Basically, you just want it to be on the hub where it's going to ride on the rotor. Okay?
Another thing to mention is you do want to make sure you clean up your rotor before you go ahead and put it all on, especially on the braking surface, because you want to make sure there's no packaging film on there or anything like that they use to make sure nothing happened on the way. Okay. I just put a lug nut on just to start it on so this rotor can't move around. This is going to help prevent rust or anything from maybe falling in or having the rotor sitting a little cockeyed while we're trying to work.

We just need it snug. We don't need to really torque it down or anything like that because we're going to be taking it back off. Okay? I'm going to grab my bracket and I'm going to grab my bolts real quick. We've got our two bolts. Just use a little bit of thread locker. Okay. We've got our caliper bracket. Just slides in just like this. We've got our two bracket bolts. We're just going to try to wiggle the bracket around until the bolts start in. Not going to tighten either of them down until we have them both started.

This is common procedure for pretty much anything here. You want to make sure that you have all of your bolts started on whatever you're doing before you tighten any of them down. Okay? Now that they're both started, I can go ahead and bottom them out and then we're going to torque them down.

I grabbed a 17 millimeter ratchet wrench. I'm going to go ahead and snug these right up. I'll bottom them out and then we're going to torque it down to 88 foot pounds. There we are, bottomed out. There we are. Grab my torque wrench. Still using a 17, obviously. Doing the same bolts. Okay. Turn this one. There we are. We've got two bolts, we torqued them both, we can move on to putting our pads in, putting our caliper on, and then bleeding it out.

So here we go. We've got our pads, we've got the tin right here that has our little flippy do. All right. That's facing down so we're just going to go like this. We've got our brake squealer. That's going to go facing down. We're just going to try to get it set up so it squeezes in. It should move around fairly freely, not too much up and down, but mostly just like this. Okay?

So if you try to squeeze it in and it won't go in, you're thinking you got to use a hammer, bang, bang, bang, something went wrong. You're going to have to clean up your bracket a little bit more, try again. It's okay. Don't be down about it. Just take it apart, do it right. So here we go. We'll do the other one. It should slide right in. Very nice, very nice, love it.

Now we can go ahead, we'll get our caliper going here. We already checked to make sure that our pistons weren't leaking anything. They looked great. The next thing you'd want to do is make sure you clean this up a little bit. Make sure there's no debris or garbage inside there, any flakes. We'll grab our brush, we'll clean this all up. We're going to add a little bit of brake caliper lube here, there, there, and there. And then we'll mount it up.

I used my brush. I gave it a little scuffing. I could have probably done a little better but I'm not really that worried about it. I got my other brush right here with a little bit of lubricant on it. I'm going to do both caliper pistons just where they touch onto where the pad is, okay? We don't need to paint the whole caliper, make it all nice and lubed. It's really not about that.

It's just about making the contact points lubricated. It's going to help with vibration dampening. It's also going to help make sure that the pad can freely move around as it should. So we got our little forky do's on the front here. We'll get those nice and lubed. Okay? That looks pretty great.

We've got our two small caliper bracket bolts. If you want to use a little bit of thread locker on those, you could. We're going to get the caliper up on here. Notice that these spin, right? We remember that. We've got these little lines right here. That's going to catch. So you need to have these lined up with the way that that's going to be. Otherwise, you're going to have an issue getting them on. Okay? Let's get that like that, this one like that.

Okay. I'm just going to grab a little bit of thread locker. I'm going to get both these started, feels good. I want to be able to move the caliper around, feels good. We're going to go back to using our wrench. We'll snug these down and then we'll torque them. Using my 14, snug. Set this one, snug, perfect. Let's get these torqued down.

So we've got our torque wrench set to 20 foot pounds. We're going to make sure we torque both of these, one and two. You can do them whichever order you want. I didn't mean to specify that. There we go. 20 foot pounds really isn't very much. So there we go.

Now that we've got these torqued, we're going to go ahead and pump up the brake. We'll get it so the brake pedal feels like it's nice and firm. Okay? Once it feels like it's firm, we'll pop open this bleeder screw, we'll wait for a solid stream of fluid to come out, then we'll close it back up. Then we can commence with our brake bleeding process.

Assuming you had another person that could help you out with it, they would want to sit inside the vehicle, pump up the brake three to five times, very slowly. One, two, and so on, three to five times. On that third or fifth time, you want to hold the pedal. Somebody else is going to come out here with their 10 millimeter wrench. Open it up, being very careful to wear safety glasses. Fluid's going to come out, under pressure, might even splash up against here, could hit you in the face. Wear your safety glasses.

Once the fluid stops coming out, close it, have them do it again, and keep doing that process until you see no more air coming out of here. If you have to do it a whole bunch of times, you're going to want to go back up top and you're going to want to make sure you double check your brake fluid so it doesn't go empty or else you're going to have a lot of air coming out of here and we're going to have big issues. Okay?

One last thing, bleeder screw cover. Super important. Keeps the water from getting in there, rotting up this so you can't open up your bleeder screw. Boop. So let's get lug nut off of here. All that was doing was just making sure the rotor didn't move around too much on us. I'm going to grab my wheel. I'm going to roll it up my leg and lift it with my abs. I'm not going to come from the front and try to lift with my back, potentially hurt myself.

I'm going to try to stay healthy as long as I can. I want to live a long time. Hold the wheel, start my lug nut, bottom it right out if you want, as close as you can so the wheel can't move around too much. All right. Grab the rest of them, throw one on the floor. We'll just get them all started on, then we'll bottom them out. I'll go grab my other lug nut, we'll bottom them out, and then we'll torque them down.

Okay. Got them all bottomed out. Now we're going to bring it down so the wheel is just barely touching the ground. We don't want all the force of the vehicle on it. Then we're going to torque these down to 88 foot pounds. So here we go. We've got our torque wrench, 19 millimeter. We're going to 88. The actual torque spec is 88.5. This particular torque wrench doesn't do 0.5, at least as far as I know. Don't mind that.
There we go. So I did a star pattern. We've got them all torqued down. We're good to go. Great job.

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Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

In this video, we'll be replacing the front brakes on a 2015 Subaru Forester. If you need these parts or other parts for your vehicle, click the link in the description and head over to 1aauto.com.

I'm going to take this tire off. Before I lift it up off the ground, I'm going to break the lug nuts free. I'm going to use a 19mm socket and a breaker bar. Just break them loose. All right, with the tire up in the air, then I can take the tire off.

Okay, now I'm going to take these two caliper bolts off. I'm going to use a 14mm wrench. Before I loosen this one up all the way, I'll loosen the top one just like that. Take these bolts out. All right, so we're going to pull this caliper off. I can take a flat blade screwdriver and just pry in here a little bit. I'm going to pull out to compress the piston a little, and then we can pull the caliper off just like that.

I'm going to use a bungee cord to hold it up. Go through the caliper hole and then over here. That'll keep the pressure off the brake line. We'll just set that out of the way. All right, now we're going to take out the pads. Sometimes you need a screwdriver to pry them out a little bit. Pull that pad out. Then we'll pull the inboard pad out.

Next we're going to take these caliper bracket bolts out. They're 17mm. So I'm going to use a 17mm socket and a ratchet. We'll take these out. For the top one, I had to use a wrench because the socket would not fit in this area because it was hitting the strut bolt. All right, so we'll take the bottom bolt out. This would be easier if you had a ratchet wrench to get the top one out because you'd fit it in there better. Pull that bolt out. Okay, and pull the bottom one out. Now we can pull the bracket right off the rotor.

So to get the rotor separated from the hub, what we can do is we can take a hammer and hit right around in these areas. We actually sell this hammer at 1aauto.com. But in addition to that, there's these two little screw holes that you can thread some bolts. You'll have to find some bolts that fit. Whoops. So we'll thread this bolt here and thread this bolt here. I'll take a ratchet. I'm just going to snug these up a little bit. I'm not going to put too much pressure on them. Just wait till it gets snug, just put a little bit of pressure on, and then we'll do this the same to this one. And then I can just take my hammer and give it a tap. If I have to, I can tighten this up some more, and it's pulling the rotor right up just like that, and then the rotor comes off. All right.

We're going to clean this caliper bracket up. You can take a wire brush and just go like this. Clean up the pad slides. You can use a smaller wire brush to get in there a little better. Get some of the rust and corrosion out of here. We can take this pad slide off. Use a screwdriver. Get underneath there and pull that off. There's a little bit of rust and corrosion under here. Just take the wire brush and clean this area.

Take the smaller wire brush and get right in there. On the back of the pad guide, we can just clean this a little bit. This isn't that bad, so just wipe it a little bit. Just get a little of the rust off. We can reinstall this, and then do the same for the other side.

We're going to pull these caliper guide pins out. Pull that out. We're going to spray it down with a little brake parts cleaner. And use a rag and wipe it down. Then before we put it back, we're going to spray some brake parts cleaner into the caliper bracket. Clean this out a little bit. Drain that out. Then we're going to take some caliper grease, brake caliper grease, put it on the pin, and then we can put the pin back in. Make sure the boot goes over the pin just like that, and we'll do the same for the other side. All right.

So before we put our rotor on, we're going to want to take a wire brush or some sandpaper and clean this hub surface up. There's a lot of rust and corrosion on here. Take a smaller wire brush and get in here. All right, I'm just going to install the rotor backwards for a second because I'm going to spray the back side of the rotor with some brake parts cleaner and wipe it down with a rag.

There's a coating on the rotors, so that it does not corrode while it's sitting on the shelf. So now we'll flip it around. Now we'll spray this side of the rotor and wipe it down. Next we can install our caliper bracket and slide it over the rotor. And then with our bolts, we're going to slide them in the back side. We're going to torque these caliper bracket bolts. I'm going to use a 17mm socket and an extension with a torque wrench. We sell this torque wrench at 1aauto.com.

The reason for the extension is I can't get in there because of the strut bolts. And we're going to torque these to 59 ft-lbs. So that's good. For the bottom one, I'll take the extension off. And they're good. All right, so we're going to take a little bit of brake grease, and put it on the ends of these brake pads and on the side. This side, and the same on this side, and on there. Do not get the grease on the pad friction material.

All right, so we'll start with the outside. Put this one down. All right, so this little tab is going to come out a little bit. That's going to ride right along here, so we'll push that right there, and then it's just going to slide in there right like that. So that pushes on the outside.

Now we'll take our bungee cord off the caliper and set that aside. Take our caliper and flip it upside down here. A little bit of rust in there. Shake that out. So I'll take one of the old brake pads and slip it right here. Then I can use a caliper compressing tool. You can buy these at 1aauto.com. This is only a single piston caliper tool, but if you use the brake pad, we can alternate back and forth to get it to go down. Just slowly compress the caliper. You could also use some channellock pliers or a C-clamp to get these to compress.

All right, now the caliper's compressed all the way. Pull this brake pad off. Make sure that the hose is not twisted the wrong way, and you can slide the caliper back onto the bracket. Now we can reinstall the caliper bolts—the bottom one and the top one. All right, I'm going to use some small locking pliers to prevent the caliper guide pin from spinning, and I'm going to use a 14 mm socket and a torque wrench, and I'm going to torque these bolts to 20 ft-lbs. I'll do the same for the bottom. Use some locking pliers and this guide pin.

Then we're going to put the tire up. Put the lug nuts on. We'll just snug these up by hand before I lower the vehicle. All right, so I'm going to use a 19mm socket and a torque wrench. We're going to torque these lugs down to 89 ft-lbs, and I'm going to do it in a star pattern so that the wheel gets torqued down evenly. All right, before we take the vehicle and take it for a ride, we're going to want to pump the brake pedal, because what's happening is there's an air gap between the brake caliper piston and the brake pad, so when we pump the pedal, that's pushing fluid back down to the calipers and getting rid of that air gap. And the brake pedal, once the brake pedal feels good, then you're good to go.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry.

Hi, I’m Mike from 1A Auto. We’ve been selling auto parts for over 30 years!

Use a breaker bar, 19 millimeter deep socket to loosen the lug nuts of the vehicle on the ground. This way the wheel's not turning on you. Get them nice and loose. Raise and support the vehicle. With the lug nuts loose, I'm just going to use the socket and take them off the rest of the way and remove the tire and wheel. Take the entire wheel off and put this aside. Just going to turn the wheel so the brake caliper is facing out and I can get to it easier.

Use a flat-bladed screwdriver. Just going to slide it in here. Just pry the caliper outwards. It's going to compress the piston. And do it to both, because this is a double piston caliper. So we just want to loosen it just enough. It'll make it easier to slide this off of the pads. And you remove the top and bottom caliper slide pin bolts. 14 millimeter, we'll start with the top one. Get that loose, same for the bottom one. Get that loose and take them both out. Slide the caliper off. Take our bungee cord, and let's see. That should work. Up and around the coil spring. Came undone. Hang right there. Pull our pads out. Can wedge a flat-bladed screwdriver in there and help you pry it out.

We're not reusing these. There's an upper and lower caliper bracket bolt. They are 17 millimeter. We'll start with the lower one. It's on there pretty tight, so I'll readjust the wrench here. We'll use a dead blow mallet and break it free. Do the same to the top one. Going to switch to a 17 millimeter socket and ratchet, make this go quicker. Put the bracket aside. Let's place some rust penetrate in here. And hit these threaded openings here and down the studs. Thread a lug nut on here because we're going to tap the rotor with a dead blow to break it free. Alright, doesn't want to move. I'm going to use these pusher holes here. It's an 8x1.0 thread pitch. Just find some appropriately sized bolts to thread in there. They're metric. Just going to use the socket that fits them and just evenly tighten them. And this is just going to push the rotor right off the hub. Easy.

Here's our original brake rotor from our vehicle. These are the original pads. The brand new pads from 1AAuto.com. And you can see on these, take our brake pad measurement tool. The new ones have 10 millimeter, and the worn ones have 5 millimeter. They're roughly half worn. Not too bad, but we're going to replace them anyways. These are an exact match. I've got inside and outside here. Take these, they're an exact match for the wear indicators on them. Those will fit great and work great.

We look at our rotors. The original rotor has a black coating on the hub to prevent rust. It does wear off as brakes do get hot. So the paint does eventually wear down and it will begin to rust. However, we've got these E-coated rotors from 1AAuto.com. So they do paint the hub. They paint the edge, to prevent rust. Off course, this will always rust because it's bare metal where your brake pads ride. But that is an exact match for the factory rotor, it'll fit great and work great for you. Then we also have available these drilled and slotted rotors. These have a zinc coating so they don't rust. You can kind of see the difference.

Zinc coating right now is over the entire surface. It will wear off where the brake pads ride, so these will flash rust, but you can kind of see the difference in a raw metal and a zinc coated here. So this also is to prevent rust and these will look cooler on a vehicle. But everything will fit exactly the same as factory and work great. Just going to check the slide pins. These move and out real nicely, I'm not going to mess with them. They're working perfectly. If they were sticking, you could pull them out of the rubber boots and clean and lubricate them, but since these are working great, I'm going to leave them alone.

Caliper hardware is stainless. And to be re-used, we're just going to clean it, put some brake parts cleaner and a wire brush. And just do the same for both sides of the caliper bracket. We're going to use our drilled and slotted rotors. These can go on in either direction. The veins inside are straight. They are not left and right. But you can pick which direction you want these to go. We're going to put them towards the front. I'm going to put it on backwards first. Just make sure the braking surface is clean. I'm using brake parts cleaner. Wipe down anything with a rag. Any packaging oil that might be on these. Take them off for a second. I'm just going to clean this hub up—it's not too rusty. Spray a little bit of brake parts cleaner and wipe it down. I'm going to take some copper anti-seize, just put it on the hub surface here where the rotor will touch and could potentially rust on.

So just for future service, we'll make sure the rotor can come off easily. Install the rotor the proper way, take the lug nut, and thread that down so it can't fall off. I'm using brake parts cleaner, make sure the surface stays nice and clean, free of grease and dirt. You can also buy new caliper bracket bolts from 1A Auto. This one here is really rusty and gross and the top one wasn't too bad, but we've got two brand new ones and we're going to install those. I'll put a little bit of copper never seize on these bolts, prevent corrosion. Do the top one first. So the rotor is kind of out of place, I'm going to have to push it in. I'll just slide the bracket over first and get that lined up. I'm going to reach over, move the bracket around, find where it bolts in. Do the same for the bottom one, and I have the top bolt started. Get those threaded down. Tighten these down with my socket and ratchet.

There is a lock washer that will start to compress. Go down evenly and we'll put the box wrench on here and they're already pretty tight. Put them down. Nice and tight and a quarter turn more, like that. These do have a lock washer, so once that lock washer's compressed, it won't back out. Going to make sure that these pads stay nice and clean, you don't get any grease or oil or dirt on them. Just give them a quick spray with brake parts cleaner, you don't need to soak the pad, put a little bit of caliper grease on the gears. This will help them slide on the hardware. Brake pads are curved, so that outer is going to match the outer curve on the brake rotor. You don't want to try to install them backwards. The wear indicators go towards the bottom.

Install the rear pad, the inside pad. Push it in place. Going to take our old pad, put it inside the caliper. We'll take our c-clamp, look at the set up, and you're gently compressed the pistons back into the caliper. Press these in. Get this in the middle. Those are compressed in and should slide right over our pads. Slide pin bolts do have flat sides to them, they have curved and flat. The flat's going to sit like that, same for both upper and lower.

Reinstall the slide pin bolts. Just tighten these down. Get them tight, give them a little bit more, don't want to break them, they're just small bolts. So that moves nice, in and out on the slides. Used the lug nut to keep this rotor from falling off, just make sure you take it off before you try to put the wheel and tire on.

Wheel and tire on. Start lug nuts by hand. Just going to use the socket, thread these all down, then I'll put the vehicle on the ground and torque them. Going to torque the lug nuts to 89 foot pounds and in a cross pattern. Now we need to gently pump the brakes to move the pistons out to meet the pads, not going to press it all the way to the floor. Press it about a quarter of the way, build it up. They'll start to get harder. That's perfect. Now the brake job is done.

Thanks for watching. Visit us at 1AAuto.com for quality auto parts, fast and free shipping, and the best customer service in the industry