How to Change Your Car's Brake Fluid

Video Transcript

"When you are changing your brake fluid the first thing you do is you pop the cap off of your master cylinder. Then you would take a turkey baster and you would suck all of this out and put new fluid in and you go underneath the car. So you have someone inside the car pushing down on the brake pedal and once they have the brake pedal down all the way they will say down and you will loosen this liter valve right here in the loosen direction and liquid will come out and it is good to have a catch can for that too because it gets in all this paint and it will eat that or when you are done just wipe it all off and once you have had it so that no more liquid is coming out you tighten it back up and you tell them to let it back up and they push it down again and you repeat that and you open this again and bleed it out and periodically make sure you are checking the master cylinder which is what we had opened at first and we used the turkey baster for for taking out the fluid and you keep doing this step over and over again on this particular wheel until you get new clear fluid coming out and this one is done and you will remove the next one in the back and then do the front ones. It doesn't really matter which order. Some people say it does. I don't really think it matters. Almost all the bleeder valves are at the top of the wheel or the backing plate of the wheel and they all look about the same, kind of like a little hex, a small spot and a hole right there so when you loosen it use a wrench so you can see the fluid coming out and that way you can tell when the new fluid is coming in, all the clear, the new fluid and you call see when all the old stuff is flushed out of the system cleanly. Most cars use DOT3 brake fluid, some cars will use DOT4 and for that again you will just look at the owner's manual and see what they recommend. There is a DOT5 and a 5.1 and those are for race cars so don't use those for your car. The different DOT's have different levels of absorbency for moisture and higher boiling points for DOT4 compared to DOT3."