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 1AAuto. 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 front brake replacement, the pads and rotors on this 2004 Crown Vic. This is really the same as pretty much all this generation Crown Vic. Some of the parts differ a little bit, but the procedure is generally the same. Tools you'll need are a large flat blade screwdriver, 13/16 socket or a tire iron, jack and jack stands, 14 mm and 18 mm sockets with a ratchet. You also might need a piece of pipe for some extra leverage. C-clamp and piece of wood, and a wire brush and a torque wrench. First, you want to take off your center cap. Then you want to unscrew these caps. You may need to use a wrench to loosen them up at first. We'll fast forward here through this monotonous stuff, and I do use fast forward throughout the video when I'm just doing repetitive stuff like this. If you're using hand tools, you want to have the vehicle on the ground, loosen up your lug nuts and then jack up the vehicle, secure it and remove the lug nuts. I'm using an air wrench, so once you have the wheel off, then turn the wheels like that.
Now in behind we have two 14 mm bolts, one here and one right down here. Before you remove those bolts all the way, there are two methods. You can see right down there is the piston. You want to force the pistons all the way back. Also just to get them apart. So I'm doing this, taking a big screwdriver here, putting it right in here and prying out. As I pry, you can probably see that piston go back down in there. So you want to do that, make sure you get those pistons back in as far as you can, and then we'll take these 14 mm bolts off by hand. Now most likely what you'll need to do is take your big screwdriver again and probably pry up right here, and pry up right here. Mine is coming apart easy because I've had it apart before. Then your caliper comes off, and you want to put that right up there. Now here are your brake pads. If you're looking just to replace the brake pads, you can probably pry them off. There's the front one, and then the rear one. You want to judge the condition of your rotors. These rotors look pretty nice, and that's because they've actually already been machined. The owner of this vehicle had his own brake lathe, so he decided to turn the rotors himself. So what you want to do is take the back of your fingernail and go up the rotor and feel for any And do it on the backside, too. Feel for any ridges or anything like that. If you feel ridges or something like that, either have the rotors machined or put a new set of rotors on. I'll show you how to do that.
To replace your rotors, there's a set of 18 mm bolts here and here. You'll remove those. You see I have my 18 mm socket, and this is a piece of pipe. How you'd use that is, if you want a little more leverage, put that onto the handle and pull. This is if you don't have a breaker bar. That just helps you get it loose in the beginning. For a vehicle like this, if it's in good shape, just using your ratchet will probably work. The pipe's just a tip if you do come across one that's really tight. Then that bracket comes off, and then your rotors come off. If you do have some trouble getting those rotors off, you can use a hammer. In the nice open space right here, use some impact to get them off. Putting it back together, put the rotor on. What I actually can do is just take 1 lug nut, put it on to hold the rotor in place. Put the bracket back on. Note that the bracket does go toward the inside, close to the rotor. We're going to use a torque wrench to torque these 18 mm bolts to 90 foot pounds. What you want to do is pull these stainless steel slides out, right there and there, and use a wire brush, and just clean them up. We'll put our bottom slide back on, and then the top one. Obviously, you can also clean those when you have this whole bracket off. If you don't have the rotors off, I just want to show you how to take them off. Okay, our old pads.
Actually, these pads actually have a little bit of life in them. This line down the middle is the wear indicator. So it's meant to, if you're looking at it like this, you can see how much life is left. But they were worn unevenly, so this owner wanted a new set. So the new ones from 1AAuto are exactly the same. Put them down in. If you didn't get your pistons back in enough with the screwdriver method that I showed you before, basically what I'm doing is taking a large C-clamp and a piece of wood because this car does have dual piston calipers, and you tighten up the C-clamp. And that piece of wood just helps push both the pistons back in at the same time. You definitely need to do this when you're replacing pads because the pads are much wider, so you have to force those pistons down to get it all back together. If you had 2 C-clamps you could press one down and then the other, but it works good with one piece of wood. Before you put your caliper on, just make sure that these slides are nice and free. Those do have flat spots that hold them in the caliper so the flat spot should be right on top and bottom. Take a caliper. Might have to push those slides in a little bit- and the 14 mm bolts.
Just lift up the caliper, shake it a little bit. And these bolts we're going to torque to 30 foot pounds. You might say that doesn't seem like a lot. All these bolts really do is hold the caliper in place and let it slide back and forth. What takes the braking pressure is this large bracket here, so that's why we tighten those up to 80 foot pounds, or to 90 foot pounds. So now we'll use a little fast forward. Pull your wheel around, take that lug nut off. Now we're going to throw the tire back on. Put the lug nuts on by hand first so you don't cross thread anything. Then I'll just tighten them up preliminarily with the wrench, and then I will let the vehicle down on the ground and torque the lug nuts to 100 foot pounds. So here I'm torqueing them, and I'm using a star pattern, which is crossing. One other very important thing as you're watching me put on the hubcap, make sure, when you first drive your vehicle, pump your brakes a bunch of times. Then make sure your brakes hold the car in park, then do a stop from 10 miles an hour before you road test, just to make sure the brakes get reseated.
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 serves you on the internet and in person.
WARNING: This product can expose you to chemicals including Lead and Lead Compounds, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information, go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.
