« Toro’s Backyard To The Brickyard Giveaway
TV Tonight: Wrecks to Reruns »

One Beer Projects: Doing Your Own Brakes

By Chuck Cage

Grab a beer (OK, maybe a couple) and learn how to do your own brake job and save a ton of cash.  It’ll take longer than most of our projects, but look at it this way: you can build yourself a small bar for what you’ll save.  We’ll talk you through finding the parts and getting the job done.  (Podcast Download)


This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 12:34 pm and is filed under One Beer Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “One Beer Projects: Doing Your Own Brakes”

  1. cc Says:
    May 18th, 2007 at 1:39 am

    miata huh? cool.
    You guys left out bleeding the brakes? While you’ve got your car up in the air and all of the wheels off, you might as well bleed the brakes. I don’t know how well those bleed assist tools work, but you can call a friend over to help with the bleeding. And I guess that makes this into a six pack project. And then you might as well change the air filter, fuel filter, grease all of the fittings, rotate tires, flush radiator, yadda yadda. Make it a few cases of beer.
    I’ll admit that I take one of my cars to my mechanic because the rears are drums, and I don’t mess with drums.
    Also, I agree wholeheartedly with buying new rotors instead of getting them turned :
    1. new rotors don’t cost that much more. You discussed this, but it’s worth mentioning again.
    2. I’ve seen rotors turned incorrectly - the operator tried to take off too much at once and the turning machine ended up chattering on the rotor. He didn’t mention this when he gave the rotor back to my friend, of course. Nice. Worst case scenario, some sort of hilarious or catastrophic brake failure. Best case scenario, you’re out ten bucks for rotor turning and you STILL have to buy new rotors.
    3. Heat dissipitation is part of the functionality of the brake rotor. If you’re removing material from the rotor, then its thermal properties will be affected. Which reduces the effectiveness of the pads as well. The inevitable result : hilarious or catastropic brake failure

    This message was brought to you by the national association of brake rotor vendors

  2. Toolmonger » Blog Archive » How To Replace Your Front Brakes Says:
    June 8th, 2007 at 1:20 pm

    […] Before you jump into the task, though, give our recent “Doing Your Own Brakes” One Beer Podcast a listen as well! […]

  3. Dave Says:
    October 9th, 2007 at 9:52 am

    Don’t bleed your brakes unless you need to. It is not a part of normal brake maintenance and does not need to be done regularly like oil changes or brake pad replacement. Your brakes should only be bled after introducing air into the system. If you take the brake line off of the caliper, or open any line joint or bleeder, you need to bleed the brakes. If you’re just replacing the pads, you shouldn’t ever need to open the system. If you do bleed your brakes, and you don’t know what you’re doing, you could just put more air into the system. Air in a hydraulic system is bad. Not being able to stop your car is also bad.

    And I DO mess with drum brakes. They’re not so bad. Get a shop manual, sit down on one side of the car and tear it apart. Even if you can’t remember how to put it back together and the book isn’t helping, you’ve still got the other side to look at.

Leave a Reply