Kodiak E-Z Lube Disc Brakes Installation
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How to Install the Kodiak E-Z Lube Disc Brakes
Hey guys, it's Jake here with etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at, and I'm gonna show you how to install, the Kodiak 3,500 pound disc brakes. The biggest reasons why people will want to switch from the traditional electric drum brakes to hydraulic disc brakes is, first off, it's going to be a much more responsive breaking. It's gonna be stronger. And when it comes to changing your brakes, you don't have to mess with drum brakes, you can change your brake pads just like you do on your car. These are gonna be available in a few different finishes.
Here we have the standard Dacromet finish. There's also gonna be a ChromaGuard and a stainless steel finish. They're gonna come two to a kit. So if you have tandem axles like we have here, you're gonna have to pick up two kits. So with that being said, let's go ahead and show you how to get them installed.
To start our installation, we need to remove our wheels and tires from our axle. (drill whirls) Now, we're working on a lift today, but if you're at home, you want to lift the trailer by the frame and use a set of jack stands in order to keep one set of wheels and tires off the ground while your other ones have wheel chocks on. (drill whirls) Next, we need to remove our grease cap. (hammer bangs) And you can usually do this with a screwdriver pretty easily. Get it in behind there and then twist the screwdriver.
Just work your way around. And we'll take a paper towel, wipe off all this old grease, so we can see what we're doing. We'll need to pop off this retention ring that is holding our nut in place. Now it should be able to thread right off. And pull the drum off and set it down.
Now, we can take our wiring and disconnect it. And we'll take a socket and a wrench, and we'll break these nuts loose on the backside. And you just slide your brakes right off. To get our new brakes installed, we'll have to start with the brake flange itself that our caliper will be attached to. You will need to pick up separate hardware in order to get this attached. You just slide it in. On disc brakes, you will always want this flange to be on the back side of the tire. And then we'll slide on a lock washer and we'll snug these down. Now, we're gonna use this bearing packer to pack grease into our bearings. Make sure we throw it in there. Just press it down. And then all we have to do is pump our grease in, and we're gonna pack them with high temperature bearing grease. Now, I'm gonna show you another method. If you don't have a bearing packer, you can just take some grease out of a tub, make sure it's that same high temperature bearing grease. Just put it in your hand, and then all you have to do is take the larger diameter side of the bearing and just push it in to the bearing itself. And you can see that it's working by watching the grease come out the other side. And don't forget to pack both the inner and the outer bearing. Now we need to put a little bit of grease on our spindle. Now we can start assembling our bearings. So we'll take our inner bearing. Drop it in place. It's gonna be the larger one. And now we need to put our seal in place. So we'll set our seal right on top. And all you wanna do is you wanna make sure the seal is nice and square on top. And then take a board, lay flat on top. Start tapping into place. (hammer bangs) And what the board helps with is it helps to drive it in evenly without damaging the seal. Now we take our brake rotor and slide it on. And you just wanna make sure that seal sits back on the end of that spindle. We'll take our outer bearing, slide it into place. Then we'll have to reuse the old washer on the outside. So we'll clean off (indistinct), slide it over, and then our nut. We will have to reuse the nut, also. When we're tightening down this axle nut, we want to get it nice and snug. You'll want it that tight to be able to seat the bearings, but the rotor is not able to move freely. So what we need to do is we'll back it off slowly until we get the right amount of movement. That's still a little tight there. And that should be about good there. It's usually about an eighth of a turn to get it loose enough to spin freely by hand. Now we'll put on the retention ring that we need to reuse from our original set. Now we can get our brake calipers in place. Just a tip for you, make sure you slide your bolts into place first, because you're not gonna be able to get them in place, at least the top one, 'cause the trailer will be in the way. So slide it down over the bottom bracket, and then up and in. Now, this is a tight fit so you may have to tap it in with a soft flow hammer or a rubber mallet. (hammer bangs) Now we've got our caliper in place, we can thread in our bolts. Now with everything assembled, we can give the spindle a couple more shots of grease. And with all our grease inside the spindle, we can tap on a new grease cap. Then we can fill our hub with grease. Now we can put on our rubber cap. Now we need to reconnect our hydraulic lines if you already had hydraulic brakes. If you didn't, you're gonna be like us. We're replacing our electric brakes with hydraulic brakes, and we need to pick up a kit that has the hydraulic lines and the actuator in the kit. And we already ran the lines and installed the actuator. We'll go ahead and show you how we did that. On most trailers, it's gonna be different how you run this line, but we started by running our hydraulic line up into the trailer. Most people are gonna run the actuator outside on the trailer frame, but the owner of this trailer wanted it inside so it was safe from the elements. So we started by drilling a hole in our trailer frame. We just just expanded the one that our wiring is coming down through. Ran our fitting up and inside. Made a slight bend, which we'll show you later going into our actuator. And we came down using some hose clamps and ran it along our trailer frame. And the nice part about this tubing is it's very, very malleable. So you can bend it with your hands. You just wanna be careful, 'cause you can kink it and that'll crack the line. But we ran it all the way along our trailer frame. And it makes for a very nice, neat install. So we ran it over here. What you want to do is you want to loop it up, because you don't wanna make any cuts, 'cause our ends already have the fittings on them with the flares. And with this being a tandem axle, we have a four splitter here. So we came into the end, we took one line, ran it over to the passenger side of the trailer. Another line will go into our brake line, down to our front brake on the driver's side. And then on the other side, it'll come out and go back to our rear axle, which will just directly feed into the rear brake. But if we follow this line over here, you can see we didn't quite have enough to make a loop. So we just put a slight bend in it to take up that extra space. Ran it along. Ran it into a T fitting, which will also come in the hydraulic line kit. Ran it out into our front brake on our passenger side, and then we came out of it, ran along our frame like we did on the driver's side into our rear brake. This brass fitting that's on the brake caliper will come pre-installed, and you'll just have to run it down and thread each one of them in. When making these connections, I definitely recommend picking up a line wrench if you don't already have one. The way it's gonna differ from a standard wrench is it's going to only have a slot large enough for the line to fit in, otherwise it won't fit over the fitting. You slide the line in and then slide it over. And the reason for this is you need it to be, these brass fittings, to be surrounded more than a typical wrench will, 'cause what you'll do is you'll round off these edges. And we do have some available on our website. Now, we're inside our trailer, where we installed our hydraulic actuator. We also installed a breakaway box with it, because you'll have to have that in order for the emergency brakes to be applied. But the way we installed it, how we ran our wires is, there is a good graphic that we will pop up here on the screen. And the black positive wire from the actuator will need to connect to the black wire coming out of our battery box. And then the yellow wire will connect to the blue wire coming from our battery box. The white wire will connect to the ground. And the blue wire coming out of our actuator will have to go to the INCA controller, which is your brake controller, for your vehicle. We made all of these connections inside of our junction box, which we also recommend if your trailer doesn't have. And you can see here, as we referenced earlier, this is where we ran our hydraulic line up and into our actuator. Now with everything connected, we can fill up our actuator and start bleeding our brakes. If you already had a hydraulic kit, it's gonna take a lot less fluid to bleed your brakes. When you're bleeding your brakes, you wanna start with the furthest back brake caliper and move your way, move your way up, and then we'll move over to the other side of the trailer. And you're gonna want to have somebody inside, filling the actuator as it's pumping it through the lines. We started with this rearmost one and now we're moving up to this one. And you just wanna bleed the lines until there's no more air bubbles coming out. Go ahead, Joe. Good. And once you do it to one side of the trailer, you want to do the same to the other. Now, you can do this from underneath the trailer, but it's a lot easier if you remove the wheels. After you bleed out all your brakes, you want to check for any leaks on all your connections. We checked ours and ours didn't have any leaks, so we can go ahead and get our tires back on and hit the road. Well guys, hopefully this information was helpful on the insulation of the Kodiak disc brake kit for 3,500 pound axles.
Info for these parts were:
Video by:
Dustin K
Video Edited:
Chris R
Installed by:
Michael B
Installed by:
Jacob H
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