How to Remove the Brake Caliper Bridge on Your Car

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Nate McCullough on behalf of expertvillage.com. In this clip we are going to talk about the proper way to remove your vehicle's caliper bridge. The vehicle's caliper bridge is this component here and as you can see it has the rotor trapped behind it. In order to service this rotor on this particular vehicle, this bridge needs removed. This particular vehicle has two mounting bolts located through the steering knuckle here and here. On this particular vehicle they happen to be a 17 millimeter. I prefer to use a ratchet just like so to break them loose. Depending upon where you live and who tightened these bolts down last, they may be extremely tight. This one doesn't happen to be that way. If you run into a situation where you can't get these bolts out, you may require the services of a professional mechanic to zip them out for you with an impact gun. Go ahead and use my socket wrench to take them off here. You can see how I struck that bolt. Applying that impact delivers much more turning forest to that bolt than to just try and grab hold of it and push. That is why I like to take and strike them. There is no lock tight recommended for installing these bolts for obvious purposes. They do have to be torqued down when you reinstall them. Once you get both bolts out, you are going to want to place them in the same location. It seems I flipped my ratchet here. There you go. We are now free of both mounting bolts I believe. For clearance purposes as you can obviously see, you may want to have a wrench handy as well. Go ahead and give it a little wiggle. All right, that's the proper way to remove your vehicle's caliper bridge. You are also going to want to inspect your bridge and clean off any excessive corrosion that may be apparent on it. "