rev up your engines today I'm gonna show you make your car's
brakes last almost forever now your car's braking system is important,
it stop your car it turns all the kinetic
energy of motion of your car when it's moving into heat which then makes the
car stop, all that kinetic energy of a big car going down a road got to turn
into something if you make the car stop and the brakes turn it into heat
now modern brake systems say they're pretty well designed when I was a young
mechanic you could wear out those old drum brakes every 15 20 thousand miles
modern brakes systems are made out of pretty good material I've seen customers
get well over 100 thousand miles out of a set of brake pads, now braking systems
are pretty much sealed systems they have very little maintenance these days but
there is a little bit of maintenance you can do to extend their life now when I
was young mechanic you actually had to clean them
every once in a while or they get squeaky they'd make noise they fade they
wouldn't work right, but even today I like this matrix it has drum brakes in
the back so here's what you do you Jack the car up in the air then you take off
the wheel, and there's the drum and you give it a little wack and you can get it off and
as I said this has a little spacer so put
that back in here so it'll be on the right place when you put it back on, now
as you can see inside the drum it's all bunch of dust here we want to get rid of
all that dust just wiping the garbage can, and to make sure it's clean well get
some brake cleaner and spray the inside and when you tilt it, it will all go out, I know
you'll notice there's a lot of surface rust that doesn't mean anything the only
thing that matters is the inside here where the brake pads touch, then get a
pan and clean the pads and the hardware all the spring, now this stuff does stink
so use a big fan like I have on the inside there's three little pieces that
rub against if you're doing an actual brake job when you took the drum brakes
off you get a little break grease and put a little bit on each of the points
so they don't squeak but we didn't take it apart so the grease that I did when
it did the brake job a few years ago is still in there they don't make any noise
and that's pretty much it for the drum brake maintenance they just themselves
they have an automatic adjuster and we sprayed that clean when we did all the
springs so I know it's working because the brakes are nice and tight every time
you back up and slam on the brakes they tighten themselves, and then of course do
the same thing on the other side, the front are discs and as you can see the
discs are pretty much open-air any dust on them are just gonna blow around it
doesn't accumulate on the rotors and as you can see they're surface rust all
over the place that means nothing the only thing that matters is the part here
that the brake pads squeeze to stop the car and these are good brakes you can
see they're vented here so the heat that's through these vents faster and
makes the car stop better the only thing you have to worry about this brakes is
whether the pads are too thin once they get thinner than let's say dime then
they're time to change them so the metal doesn't hit metal if they're wet and
they have leaking brake fluid then either the hose is leaking going to it
you can see that or the caliper itself was shot inside and it was leaking fluid
you can see this is bone-dry there's no leaks anywhere so there's
nothing wrong with this, now brake systems use brake fluid relatively non
compressible fluids step on it, it sends all the power to
squeeze them it doesn't compress much at all, it does a tiny bit but you're not
really gonna notice that but the fluid itself is hygroscopic it absorbs water
and there's a lot of water vapor around here you can see me, Houston's
a humid place, so if you keep your cars forever like me it's a good idea every
five years or so to flush out your brake fluid and put new fluid in it that
doesn't have any humidity, but if you're the type of guy that gets rid of your cars
when they have a hundred thousand miles six eight years old, you don't even have to
do that really they're not gonna go bad in
that short period of time from my experience, now you do all those things
fine and dandy breaks you're gonna last a long time but the absolute top tip for
making your brakes lasts as long as possible it's break conservatively years
ago I had a customer the BMW I kept putting brake pads on it like every
9,000 miles and now he's using BMW pads from the dealer so I wasn't using cheap pads
so when he came over for the next brake job and they were real thin
they're less than the Dimes thickness I said let's go for a ride so I watched
them and I noticed he had one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas and he
said oh I only drive an automatic, they taught me at school to have one foot on
the brake the left and the right foot on the gas well he took it too literally
and he left his foot on the brake so he dived down the street and whole time his
brake light is on so he's driving with one foot nothing to brake and one foot
on against a car see wore the red pants out faster if you don't carry a lot of
weight in a vehicle and you drive conservatively, a modern car it's nothing
to get a hundred thousand miles out of a set of front brake pads, now of course
when you have to stop in an emergency situation slam on the brakes by all
means you don't want to hit somebody if you prepare ahead of time and you don't
have to slam on the brakes they're gonna last a lot longer but when it does come
time to change your brake pad job use quality brake pads not the cheapest things
you can get your hands on a lot of my customers don't like squeaks
so if you don't like squeaks you want quality pads Akebono pads are the best, a
lot of times they're actually better than the
factory pads that they came with, so now you know how to make you brakes last
almost forever on your car and since this is mechanic Monday I'm giving away
a case of this brake cleaner spray to have a chance to win place a clean
non-offensive comments on the YouTube comments below and their winner will be
chosen randomly by computer to get a case of this great great cleaning fluid
to make them sparkly clean and stop all they have noise in your drum brakes, so
if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to
ring that Bell