How to Perform a Brake Inspection

Video Transcription

Hello, my name is Thayre Hawkins; owner of Auto Alternative & Sales. We are located between Nicholasville, and Lexington, Kentucky; just 3 miles off of Man-of-War, just off Nicholasville Road.

I wanted to take a little bit of time today and show you how to perform a brake inspection.
There are some fine points to a brake inspection that ensures that you get a good break job done on your vehicle.

First thing-when you get your vehicle up in the air you want to check and make sure that your wheel turns freeway.

Make sure that you do not have anything binding in the wheel. You can also check for any play and make sure that the suspension is tight on your vehicle. These wheels should be torqued on here.

If you get a chance look at our video outtake shows what happens the first time that we took this video when we could not get the wheels off because they were over torqued. Also, if you have a locking wheel covers make sure that your service provider has the key to your locked not.

So, we are going to be to work this wheel and move it, Here we have your brakes if you want to know more about your brakes go to our website at Aldo alts.com and on our resource page we have some animated illustrations that show you how brakes work and all the parts to it.

First thing that we want to look at here is look at the break rotors for any scoring. Make sure that it’s smooth on the inside and outside the house. That if there is any scoring we would want to smooth that out by using our break late which we have A program head break played that actually turns the rotor on the car. This will be a future video. That shows you just how that machine works is a very good way to true up your brakes.

We want to measure your brake rotor to make sure that it’s thick enough. It can only be turned down to a certain thickness.

If they get too thin they are liable to work more often. They do not dissipate heat well and you will start getting vibration. So, we use calipers to measure.

We get a measurement and what we will do is go to our resource and we will look up the specifications to ensure that it is within specifications. If it is we will machine the rotor and put new brake pads on.

The next thing that we want to do is to make sure that the slide pins are free on this vehicle. This is very important because if the slide pins are not free they will cause you to have a soft pedal or it can cause you to have dragging brakes.

So, I collapsed the piston just a little bit and we can see that these calipers move back and forth nice and freely.

We can now go ahead and remove the caliper piston assembly from the saddle.

We’ve got the caliper removed. I do not want to let the caliper hang by the brake line. This is the saddle that holds the brake pads and position. What happens is when you push on the break A hydraulic piston pushes these two pads together on this desk causing your wheel to stop.

So, we want to make sure these move free in the saddle. Which these move nice and free. Look at the brake pad. You can see the thickness of the brake pad right here and these are in really good shape. They still have a lot of life and them.

So we will just put those back in there, We will reassemble this and when you put the wheels back on you want to make sure that the wheels are torqued back on, That if we were doing a brake job on this, that the proper lubricant is used on the slide pins. Sometimes you can use a lubricant that will cause the rubber on the boots too so which will cause you more problems.

So, there’s fine points to a brake job to make sure that it is a good great job that lasts a long time. You will also want to inspect your piston right here to make sure there are no signs of seepage. Also inspect your rubber brake lines right here. Make sure they are all nice and free because they are pivoting all the time that you turn the wheels so they tend to wear sometimes on higher mileage vehicles.

So, this car is ready do they reassembled everything is good for many more miles. If you are in any need of break work come and see us here at Auto Alternative Service & Sales and we will get you stopping correctly. Thank you.