How to Replace Front Brakes, Pads and Rotors

Hey guys, ChrisFix here. Today I'm going to show you how to change out your brake rotors and brake pads. In this case we'll be working on my 2001 Mazda B3000 or Ford Ranger, but this process will pretty much be the same for almost any maker model. Front brakes, rear brakes, as long as they're disc brakes. It's pretty simple and very similar across the board. So here's what you're going to need to do the job. Flathead screwdriver used for prying, different sized ratchets and extensions and sockets, a breaker bar, torque wrench, brake clean, a brake pad tool. It just compresses the brake pad piston and some type of grease. I also have thread locker for the caliper bracket bolts. And don't forget about your brake pads and brake rotors. Try to get a decent quality set so that you won't have any problems with warping, brake dust and things like that. So let's begin. The first step is going to be to take the brake pads off. To do that we're going to unscrew the top caliper guide pin and then this is going to open up like a clamshell. My application, this is a 12mm, good. This is when your screwdriver will come in handy. Just pry it open. We'll worry about cleaning this up later. Right now we just want to get these brake pads out. With the brake pads out, we'll close this back up and we'll just lightly hand tighten this because we're going to be putting new brake pads in after we get the rotor done. Good. Now we're going to disconnect the whole caliper and caliper bracket from the knuckle and that's going to give us access to this rotor. To do that we just go to the back of the caliper. You can see here's that bolt we took off before. We want to get to this bolt right here. This bolt connects the caliper mounting bracket to the knuckle. There's two of them. There's one up here and there's one down here. Do the top one first. Use the breaker bar on the bottom one as well. After you break the bolts you can just use a regular ratchet. That's the top one. When you're almost done unscrewing this, hold on to the caliper because it's going to drop out if you pull this out. Have some type of bucket or something ready to put the caliper on. Make sure your brake line is loose because you don't want to have pressure on here because you could damage the brake line. Now this should just slide right off like so. Slide the new one on. We're going to hit the new one with some brake clean because it comes with a protective coating. We want to get that coating off. Now before we put the brake caliper back on what I like to do is I like to seat this properly and then take one of my lug nuts and just tighten it down so that this doesn't move. So then this won't slide out while you're trying to put the brake caliper back on. So let's put the brake caliper on off the screen. I actually painted my brake caliper. If you want to see how to do that there's going to be a video link in the description below. With the brake caliper dry we'll mount it back onto the knuckle. Get the caliper bolts and we add some Loctite thread locker on each one and that'll just prevent vibrations from loosening this up. So one of the best ways to do this is get one of your bolts, just slide it in and stick it out a little bit out of the hole just so that you can more easily align this hole with that bolt. Once you get it aligned hand tighten it just so it holds it in place. Good. Get our other bolt, slide it in and hand tighten. After hand tightening those two bracket bolts we'll torque them down to 85 foot pounds. That's the top one and that's the bottom one. So remember we had this hand tightened so that we could take it off when we wanted to put the brake pads in so just unscrew that and then this is going to open up like a clamshell. Now what we want to do is we want to compress these two pistons here so that they move inward so we can fit the thicker brakes because right now our brakes are really thick but this is set to the thickness of the old brakes which are worn down and we'll be using an old brake pad and this tool. Before we compress those pistons we're going to want to go to the master cylinder and just open this so that you can let it breathe. Don't leave this cap loose for long because we don't want moisture getting in so just get the job done and then tighten it back up. This just relieves the pressure of the system. So what you do here is you get an old brake pad and you put it against the pistons in the system. Then you get your brake pad tool and since there's two pistons here we'll do each piston one at a time and you just tighten your tool just like that and then you crank away. Now you do this piston a little bit then we'll go to this piston so it's not closing unevenly because right now there's pressure on this one too, just not a lot. So loosen this up, go to this side, tighten this down all the way, go back to this side and we'll tighten this up, good. Both our brake pistons are completely pressed in so now we can put brake pads in. You want to add grease to the brake parts that have metal to metal contact on the caliper. Make sure you use very little grease when doing this. You'll grease where the brake pads sit and contact the caliper. So you can see the brake pads sit there, they sit here, they press against this plate here and then they also sit on that side and up here. So those are all your grease points. The other thing is now's a good time to grease your guide pins. Just pop off that cover, pull them out, just take your guide pin, clean it off, take off this rubber boot here. I like to slide the guide pin back in, move it around, get any of that extra dirty grease out of there. On my guide pins I like to use high temperature silicone instead of grease. Grease is a petroleum product. This piece is made of petroleum so eventually it will wear it out and become like gummy and it won't allow the caliper to slide freely. Silicone is compatible with these boots so it will lubricate it and allow it to slide back and forth but it won't eat this up. I have my heavy duty silicone, high temperature. I'll put it in where the guide pin goes. I will also spray the guide pin itself then we'll slide the boot back over. Make sure that the boot sits on that edge here, there you go, so it doesn't come off. With a light tug it shouldn't pop off. Push that in there, make sure it sits on the edge here and you can see, freely moves around. Now you can do the same for the bottom one. You want to make sure your brake pads have these wear indicators on here. What happens is when the brake pads go below a certain thickness, this scrapes against the rotor and since this scrapes against the rotor it creates a high pitched squeal noise and that squeal noise will let you know you need brakes soon because you're almost done. So just make sure that's attached. If you don't have one on your brake pads, consider getting different brake pads because this is a good warning signal to let you know when your brake pads are getting really low. Now let's go put the brake pads in. This is pretty simple, the brake pads only fit one way, they both have the same ends so all you have to do is find how these slope and they slope this way so the brake pad goes in that way. Then you can see that little clip that it slides into, there's one down here and one up here. So this just simply slides right in, nothing to it. You can see it fits in there, right in the top and fits in there right at the bottom. Get our other side, they're going to fit in like that, again very simple, just slides right in. Now when you're doing this make sure your brake pads are completely against the rotor here and make sure your pistons are collapsed. You'll know in a second if you collapsed your pistons enough because when you close this it won't close all the way and it closes. Final step, put that last screw in right at the top here, connects to the guide pins. On my vehicle this gets torqued to 20 to 25 foot pounds but I just hand tighten it and then give it an extra quarter turn and then that's about 25 foot pounds. And there you go, now you're done. You don't have to bleed the brakes as long as you don't undo the caliper from the brake line or undo a brake line in general. Hopefully this video was helpful, if it was give it a thumbs up, also consider subscribing. Up on the screen there are going to be some videos, you can click on the video on the screen or you can find a link to those videos in the description below. Also in the description below are the links to the ChrisFix Facebook and Twitter pages. Check it out!