I am going to change my front brakes. This is going to be the first time I work on brakes so I'm not 100 percent sure what I am doing. When I bleed the brakes do I need to bleed both lines or does on line clean out the whole system? As you can tell I am not the most mechanically minded person lol. That's why I am so glad I found this forum. I appreciate any help or advise I can get as I try to restore my pickup to its original condition.

 

Unless you are replacing the line or the caliper, just put the new brakes on and you should be fine, but dont forget to loosen the cap on the master when you push the cup back in on the caliper, if the brakes are real spongy after you change them, then bleed the brakes.

 

Ok thank you. If I have any problems I will be back on here lol. I've been spending too much money paying mechanics to fix the things wrong I need to try and start doing some work myself.

 

Suggest to inspect the dust boot around the caliper piston. If it has failed, it's likely the piston will have some corrosion and the like. Pushing the piston back in typically ruins the seal, resulting in a brake fluid leak. In this case, I've found it's just as cheap and so much easier to buy a rebuilt caliper than the joy of rebuilding one myself. If the boot looks OK, then should be good-to-go.

If your master cylinder is near full, may want to wrap a rag around the fill port to catch any overflow when the pistons are pushed back in.

Perhaps old-school habit, but I like to spray some disc-brake quiet material on the backs of the pads (the metal plate only, not on the pad material itself!). Nothing like the 'high' of doing your own work, followed up by the 'low' of having to tear things apart again because of some doggoned annoying squeal.

Be sure to clean up the slide rails between the caliper and the horseshoe mounting bracket, and apply a light coat of high-temp grease to both surfaces. The pad sets I've gotten recently come with new retainer pins - otherwise you might consider getting new hardware. Not absolutely necessary, but I'm getting to the point of 'do it right, and you only have to do it once'.

If you choose not to turn the discs, recommend to match up the widths of the pads between the old and new sets.

Back in my penny-pinching days, put a set of cheap pads on. Next change, went back to the good stuff, and had problems. Close inspection showed there was maybe 1/8 inch difference in the width of material across the pads, so that the new pads were cobbling up on the ridges left by the narrower cheap pads during the previous campaign.

Eh, given the fun of taking all the 4WD stuff apart to get the discs off for turning - I opted to just get another set of cheap pads, make sure the widths matched, and slap them on. So far, so good.