In this video I will show you my very tidy method of bleeding your brakes by yourself
It's a single person, no-spill method.
Maybe you've got some air in the lines.
And you would know that by your pedal going to the floor
and needing a second press.
Or you put some components like a caliper or some stainless lines on
and introduced a little air into the system or
because brake fluid loves water and when water gets hot it goes to air.
Brake fluid is definitely a powerful desiccant.
Just like the silica gel packs that you get when you buy stuff
Brake fluid is always trying to pull moisture out of the air.
That's why when you go to the store
You'll find under the cap that the brake fluid is sealed.
And I always like to check that seal
to make sure my brake fluid hasn't been collecting moisture
while it's sitting around waiting for me to buy it.
Now, DOT 3 vs DOT 4. Well,
DOT 3 here, this one claims 460 degree boiling point.
And the DOT 4 is claiming 510 degrees.
But more important than any of that is
that you put fresh fluid in your car periodically.
I'd love to say we can leave the wheels on for this job, but it's just not practical.
So what I like to do is just put the car on jack stands and pop the wheels off.
You could do one wheel at a time.
But I just find it's much simpler
to have all four wheels ready to go before I start the job.
Now most cars have the brake fluid reservoir on the driver's side under the hood.
And we're going to be pulling old fluid out of it.
So we're going to need to remove the screen.
We'll use this vacuum pump.
If you don't have a vacuum pump, a turkey baster works fine.
I put a little rubber hose on there.
It allows me to pinch it so it won't drip.
And once you get the fluid out, you're going to need to put fresh fluid in.
I like to overfill because that way you don't run the reservoir dry while you're doing your flush.
And put the cap on and keep the bugs from flying in.
Now we're going to use a small bottle here.
And we're going to drill the lid for our 3/8-inch tubing.
The small bottles are fine.
But one problem they all have in common and that is that they like to tip over.
And break fluid it's very caustic paint remover.
So we're going to take a single screw.
We're going to screw this container down.
Not to hold brake fluid.
But we're screwing it down to hold the bottle that's going to hold the brake fluid.
Now that bottle cannot tip over.
And we have a nice little workbench too.
Now that old fluid we pulled out of the reservoir,
we're going to now pour that into the bottle.
And now we're going to take our 3/8-inch tube
and we're going to push that all the way to the bottom of the bottle
so it stays under that fluid.
And don't worry.
More fluid is going to be coming into that bottle soon.
So this is our little bleeder tool.
And here's a quick tour of your brake system.
Right underneath the reservoir you've got a master cylinder with two outlets,
a primary and a secondary.
That's going to be your front and rear brakes.
And here's the ABS secondary, primary.
And this is your rear brake front brake here.
And then the ABS splits those into the four lines that go to your wheels.
And it should look something like this.
You may not have recommendations from a manufacturer.
So you should, as a rule of thumb
start in the rear, the furthest wheels from the ABS.
And work your way to the front,
Nissan actually suggests that we go to the left front after the right rear.
That probable has to do with the ABS
and those two lines coming out of the master cylinder.
And then we'll do the left rear and right front.
So let's get started on the right rear.
Before I start any brake bleed,
I like to make sure that all of the bleeder valves are sealed at the base.
And so I'm using some heavy wheel bearing grease here on a cotton swab.
And you'll notice I'm just going to go ahead and surround the base of it
at the thread with the grease.
That just prevents any air from getting past those threads
when you open up the bleeder valve.
So let's go ahead and connect the tube.
Open up the valve.
And before we do the flush,
we want to make sure that the tube rises higher than the bleeder valve.
And that looks good so now I can go into the car.
And you'll notice as I push the pedal down,
the fluid starts coming into the tube.
And I'm not going to show all of this
but this is the furthest wheel from the ABS.
It's probably going to take you about 6 to 10 pumps
to get fresh fluid from the master cylinder.
So I'm going to tap the caliper a couple of times.
And make sure there's no air trapped in it.
Once we're done
go ahead and close the bleeder valve.
And when we lower the bottle
the fluid in the tube is going to act like a siphon.
It's actually going to suck the bleeder valve dry.
There's not even a drip remaining.
So we can just put the cap back on.
Nothing to wipe off.
And we can move on to the next wheel which is the left front.
Now these are going to take a little bit longer.
These calipers have two bleeder valves
because there are two pistons on each side of the caliper.
So it's almost like two calipers.
You could use a splitter like this to do it simultaneously
but that's more chance of drip.
So I like to do each side independent.
We'll go ahead and open up the valve.
And get the tube above the bleeder.
And you can hear me in the car pumping the brake pedal.
And once we get done,
we can give it a couple of taps with the rubber mallet.
And then we can close down the bleeder valve.
And you can hear the siphon when the tube is lowered.
You can hear the siphon in the tube sucking the bleeder valve dry.
It makes for a very nice clean setup.
Put the cap back on that.
We'll do the outside of this caliper.
And you can hear me in the car pumping the pedal.
And when we're done with the flush
tighten down the bleeder valve.
We'll lower our bottle.
And now we'll just siphon the leader valve dry.
Put our cap back on
and move on to the next wheel.
And that's the left rear wheel.
In this case, make sure you top off your reservoir
so you don't run your master cylinder dry.
That would be bad.
We would have to start the job all over again.
So now we're connected to the left rear.
And this one's a little further back.
I won't make you sit through every single pump.
The same thing.
Tighten down the bleeder valve.
Lower the bottle.
And you can siphon the bleeder valve dry.
Nothing dripped
Nothing wipe off.
Just go ahead and put the cap back on.
And the final wheel, front right.
To save you guys time, I've already done the inside of this caliper.
And I wanted to show you this in particular
because when I opened up the bleeder valve and tapped it with the mallet,
it actually released some air that was trapped in there.
So I gave a couple of extra taps.
and then we'll go ahead and do the flush.
And same thing.
When we're done, close down the bleeder valve.
lower the bottle and
it siphons it dry.
Now we can put the screen back into the reservoir.
Make sure your level's correct.
And that's how I bleed my brakes without spilling any brake fluid.
If that helps you guys out,
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Thanks for watching.