Length: 38:50
Created: June 4, 2020
[0:00] Are you ready for more lift? More ground clearance? Want to run a little bigger tire or maybe some more gear reduction? Well SuperATV’s got you covered with our GDP portals. Today I’m going to show you how to get them installed on this Can-Am Defender.
So let’s jump right in. The first thing we’re gonna do is remove our front wheel and tire. We’ve already done this, so we’ll remove our cotter pin from our castle nut, and then the castle nut.
Then we’ll take our 15 mm and remove our tie rod end from our knuckle here. We’re gonna have to remove the cotter pin from the tie rod end bolt. We’ve already done this, so we’ll remove our nut. Then we’ll remove our bolt and then our tie rod end.
[0:54] Just drop the bolt through it. Now put our nut back on, just so we know where everything is. That way we don’t have to worry about losing any hardware.
Now we’ll remove the two bolts securing the brake caliper to the knuckle. Get that guy right there, then we’ll grab this wrench.
[1:26] We’ll remove our hardware then our caliper. We’ll just lay it up here on top of the A-arm. We’re gonna be disconnecting it and switching sides with it anyways.
We’ll grab our hub and slide it straight off. Set it over here on the lift. Now we’re going to disconnect our shock. Pick up on the A-arm a little bit and the shock will drop free.
We’re going to disconnect our lower ball joint bolt.
Slide the shock out of the way. Pick up on our lower A-arm. Wiggle it free and pull our knuckle straight out, off the axle. Just let our A-arm drop down.
[2:36] Since we are gonna be removing our knuckle, we’ll actually just lay our axle over here on our tie rod, just to make it so our axle’s not hanging. That way it has some support and it doesn’t tear that boot.
We’ll remove our cotter pin out of our upper ball joint here.
Then I’m gonna show you all the trick on how to get your upper ball joint nut really easily.
All we did was take our extension and shove it through the lower ball joint hole. Then we took our 19 mm socket and stuck it on the extension. We took our impact and buzzed it right off.
[3:39] Next we’re gonna take two hammers. We’ll place one right here on our knuckle and take the other one and smack it. I do recommend, if you don’t have somebody to help you, go ahead and start your nut back on the threads of your ball joint. That way it doesn’t fall and hit the floor.
Start it on there. That way when we smack it, it’ll drop down. It will sit right on the nut.
So we’re gonna take it and hit it, just like that. It popped right loose. Then remove the knuckle and we’ll set this guy aside.
[4:16] Moving onto our rear, we’ll remove our wheel and tire. Remove our cotter pin from our castle nut, and the castle nut, just like that. Then we’ll do the same steps—we’ll disconnect the brake caliper. Remove your caliper.
Now we’ll grab our hub, slide it off, and set it aside as well. We’re gonna start removing our hardware for our A-arm attaching it to our knuckle. Just get your caliper flipped up and out of the way. Pop our bolts out. We’ll come up here to the upper A-arm.
[5:38] Looks like our axle’s stuck, so we’ll grab a rubber mallet and just give it a little tap. It comes right off. We’ll set our knuckle aside.
And then in the rear, it’s acceptable to allow your axle to hang down because as you can see, it doesn’t put it in a big bind. It just kind of sits here on the lower arm.
Now we’ll start removing our brake lines from the frame of the machine. A lot of these are really hard to get to to drill. We’re gonna take a pry bar and smack the actual T fitting and we’re gonna knock it right off the frame, because we’ll be replacing the T fitting anyway. We won’t be reusing the factory one.
So we’ll just take our pry bar, or anything you can hit it with—see, it just broke our rivet right off there.
So that one’s disconnected. Then, if you look up here, we’re gonna have a couple of rivets as well. Now these get a little bit more tricky to get to. But it’s going to be the same concept. We’re going to take our pry bar and knock the rivets out of the frame.
[6:35] So now we’re gonna go ahead and disconnect our shock just to make it a little bit easier to get to this rivet right here on the A-arm. So we’ll remove our shock bolt. Just hold our shock up out of the way. We’ll drill right through the center of this rivet right here.
Now we’re gonna remove the voltage regulator from the bracket, just to make it a little bit easier to get in there and knock our rivet off.
Lift the voltage regulator out of the way—that way you can knock your rivet off.
[7:25] For this last rivet, you’ll have to raise your bed. We’ve already disconnected our shock. You’ll want to do that as well, that way you can get your bed all the way back. Then we’ll go right down here to this last rivet and drill it out.
Next we’re going to remove the battery cover, the center section of the floor board, and then the front bulkhead cover off the machine.
[7:48] For our battery cover, we’ll go right in here and twist the two quick disconnects. It just pops right out. And then the second one’s right over here—we’ll twist it as well.
Let me grab a hold of it and slide it right out. I’m gonna set it right up on top of our seats. We’ll make sure we take our quick disconnect hardware. I’ll set it in the cup holder, that way we don’t lose it.
[8:17] We’re gonna remove the push pins that secure the center portion. We’ll remove it and then we’ll need to grab a T-25. We’ll remove this screw right here—that one, that one, that one, and that one.
Once we have everything removed we’ll go in here and remove our brake lines from these clips. You’ll grab hold of this tab, pull it down, and pick up. There’s gonna be our brake line right here.
We’ll just pull it up and out of this front one as well. Then our brake line should move fairly free. We’ll pop these clips back down just a little bit.
[9:21] Next we’re going to remove all three of our rivets securing our T fittings and brake lines to the front of the machine. Then we’ll remove the 10 mm bolts securing the brake lines to the A-arms.
You’ll want to repeat all these steps for the passenger side to the driver’s side. Then we’ll come over to the driver’s side and there’s going to be a master cylinder cover right here. Just take a push pin removal tool and remove this push pin.
It will probably fall right out for you. When you look up in there, you’ll see your master cylinder. If you take your hand and follow the brake lines back, there’s gonna be a couple push pins retaining the brake lines. It’ll just have a clamp around it and a push pin going up in the frame.
The easiest thing to do is take a long screwdriver—or if you have a push pin removal tool that’s extra long—and stick it up in there to pry them loose. Pop them out of the frame and then we’ll start disconnecting our lines from the master cylinder and pulling all of our lines off the machine.
[10:33] Remove your lower dash. Then we’ll go underneath and look straight up through here. We’ll see these two clips. These are the last two clips holding your brake line onto the machine. We’re just going to take our pry bar again and slide it up underneath the clip the best we can. Then we’ll take our hammer and smack them until they come loose.
Next we’re gonna remove the following four push pins—one here, one there, and then in the exact same spots on the opposite side.
I’m gonna pop these lower ones out first and we’ll kind of let the hood down. Come through the top and get these out as well. Lift the hood back up. That’ll let us pull our fender back out of the way enough to where we can get these two screws on the dash.
[11:47] Now we’ll go up here to our master cylinder and undo the plug located right here. We’ll cut the zip tie off of this line right here. That way when we start taking our bolts loose that are securing the brake line to the master cylinder, it doesn’t want to twist up on us. It’ll just rotate with it. So we’ll undo this plug.
Now we’ll completely disconnect the brake line. When we take them loose, make sure we don’t lose the copper washers. I’m gonna take it loose and then take my bolt, stick it right back through. Then to the master cylinder, just kind of slow the leak down until we get our new brake line ready to go. It’s still gonna leak a little bit. There’s no way to get it to fully quit leaking.
[13:04] Now we’re going to take our calipers loose from our brake line. Try to keep these calipers upright so you don’t loose all the fluid out of them. That’s just going to help you later on when we bleed our brakes.
This one, for your passenger side, we’ll let it sit right here for now.
[13:44] We’re going to head on over to the driver’s side and do the same thing. We’ll come up here on the front brake line and just pull it out. I’ll have to pull them out of the clips. You should be able to spread them by hand. Grab them apart.
It’s pretty obvious which one’s the front and which one’s the rear. Obviously this one is the rear because it’s feeding them toward the rear of the machine. And this is gonna be our front.
Then you’ll cut the zip tie and remove the rivet. And then another rivet that we can’t drill. So we’ll take our pry bar, stick it through there, and knock the head of the rivet off. Then remove the brake line.
Once we have all our fasteners removed for our brake lines, we’ll pull them out. Take the factory lines and set them aside.
[14:58] Now we’ll come back to the rear and disconnect our brake lines from our calipers, just as we did in the front.
Then we’ll remove our brake line.
The next thing we’ll do is grab all of our brake lines out of our kit. We’ll extend them out and then take measurements. This is the longest one of the kit, so obviously it’s going to be the rear. We’ll go right up through where the master cylinder is, where we previously removed the cover and our old brake lines.
We’ll route the new brake line over top of the power steering unit.
Now this line can be a little bit difficult to work with just because it’s always gonna want to go back to the form that it was in while it was in the packaging. So I like to take a little section and just start feeding it over the top. The biggest thing is to make sure you go over the top of the unit here.
[16:35] Next we’ll grab our sensor, which is also our banjo bolt. We’ll take one of our copper washers off and then leave one up against the head for the banjo bolt. We’ll slide it through and then take our other copper washer and slide it on the back side.
We’ll go up here and thread it right back onto the master cylinder, the same way that we took our old one off.
[17:00] So once we have our rear brake line installed, we’ll grab the 31″ long brake line. This will be the front feed line. We’ll grab our banjo bolt and again, the same way, put your bolt through with your copper washer. Then take your other copper washer and install it just like this.
We’re gonna take our front feed line and route it right down through the firewall with the throttle cable. We’ll run it straight down and then once we’ve ran it into position, grab our T fitting out of our hardware kit.
As you can see, our brake lines ran right up to this point. We’ll take our T fitting and thread it onto our brake line. We’ll fully tighten the brake line onto it, just because it’s that much easier to do it outside of the frame rather than when it’s bolted together.
[18:11] Get it as tight as we can. Then we’ll grab the hardware provided in the kit to attach the T fitting to the frame. We’ll just line it up and then take our hardware, stick it through, put our bolt on the bottom, then the nut on top.
Next we’ll grab the two 50″ long brake lines that go to the front of the machine. You’ll have the banjo out here for the caliper. We’re gonna take this fitting and go up to our T fitting that we just finished installing to the frame. Start it in there. Make sure you have it started nice and straight.
Go ahead and start tightening this line in there at a little bit of an angle. It can be a little difficult to get it good and started. Make sure you get it started straight.
[19:16] Then we’ll do the exact same thing for the opposite side. We’re going to take our 50″ brake line, go over here, and get it started into the T fitting.
Now we’ll head into the machine. We’re going to grab our rear brake line and route it right down to the factory clips that are on the frame here.
Then we’re gonna lift these up and gonna pop the line into the holder, all the way down through here. Then I’m gonna snap these in place, so my line doesn’t want to jump out on me again.
We’re gonna take our line and feed it. If you look, you can see daylight straight back through here. That’s the way we’re gonna run it, right out toward the daylight.
[20:46] Now we’re gonna reach down and grab our brake line from where we’ve ran it from the front toward the rear. We’re gonna grab our T fitting and thread it onto our brake line. We’ll just start it on here and then follow the frame. We’re gonna figure out exactly where we’re gonna run our brake line fitting to.
I’m gonna slide it back here. I’ll go right underneath the axle and then raise the machine up. We’ll start looking in here and figure out what we’re going to install the T fitting to.
Now we have our T fitting and we’ve attached our supply line. This line that has a 90-degree bend in it, this is gonna be our driver’s rear brake line. This line that has a straight connection is gonna be the passenger rear.
We’re going to make sure our T fitting is oriented just like this. You want the opening to the bolt to go through on this side and then right down from where the shift linkage attaches. You can see that’s where we knocked one of our rivets out.
[21:57] We’re gonna take one of the provided bolts and the hardware kit and stick it through our T fitting. Then we’ll thread it right into that hole. It’s the same diameter, so it’s going to be able to thread right in there.
Once we have our T fitting in place and everything tightened down, we’ll take our lines and run them to the appropriate areas. We’re gonna run them out toward the A-arms.
The next thing we’ll do is grab our backing plate for our passenger side. It should look just like this, with the bracket that our steering arm goes on facing the rear of the machine. We’ll grab our upper ball joint hardware. It’ll be your factory hardware. We’ll slide it on, stick our washer on, and stick our nut on as well.
We’ll take our extension and slide it up through the hole. Get our socket and tighten it.
Make sure we get it nice and tight. While it’s wide open here, it’s nice and easy to get to, we’ll reinstall our cotter pin.
[23:41] Once we have our upper ball joint attached to our cotter pin, we’ll slide our axle through our backing plate, just like this. Let it hang there.
Now we’ll take our brake and put it out of the way for the time being, until we’re ready to hook our caliper up.
Now we’ll grab our lower A-arm. Go ahead and get it lined up with our backing plate. If it doesn’t go right in, you’ll have to take this rubber mallet and give it a few taps to get it into place.
[24:18] Once we have our lower ball joint into our backing plate, we’ll slide our hardware through. Once we have that in there, we’ll fully tighten it as well.
We’re gonna grab our steering arm as well as two M12x40 mm bolts and two M12 Nyloc nuts. We’ll line it up just like this, with the bolt head coming from the inside going out. Get our nuts started.
What I like to do is take one of my long M12 bolts that’s gonna secure the portal to the backing plate, and I like to stick it through this hole before I tighten these bolts up. That way it kind of helps it align and make sure that whenever we tighten these, it’s all going to line up.
[25:28] The next thing we’re gonna do is hook our shock back up. Then we’ll grab our portal. We know this is our passenger side front because of where our CMP is going to mount up here.
We’ll take it and slide it onto the axle. Let’s grab hold of the output shaft and spin it a little bit. We’re going to take our axle nut and thread it all the way in. It’s just going to help us hold the axle and hold the portal in place.
Now we’ll grab our M12 bolts. We’ll start sliding them through. The M12 nuts just go on the back side here, and on this one right here.
On this one right here, we’re gonna use our bolt that doesn’t have a flanged head on it and we’re gonna use a washer with it as well. We’ll slide it through and take one of our Nyloc nuts. Put it on the back side and get that nice and started there.
[27:00] So now our portal box is somewhat mocked up. We’re gonna remove this bolt right here. Remove that bolt, then we’ll grab our caliper mounting plate. It’s gonna go right here.
Next we’re gonna grab the CMP that’s labeled PGH-6-CMP-015-B for the passenger side. We’re gonna grab our Allen-headed bolt that’s provided in the hardware kit and then another M12 and Nyloc nut.
We’ll put it right here. Take our Allen-headed bolt and get it started in there, pretty far. I’ll take our M12 and run it through the bottom.
Then we’ll go through and fully tighten all of our hardware.
Once we have everything fully tightened, we’ll take our recessed nut back off. Take a little bit of Loctite and apply it to the threads at the inside of the recessed nut. Now reinstall it. You’ll want to make sure you tighten that to your axle specification, depending on which axle you’re utilizing today.
We’re gonna take our recessed nut cap, as well as our three short Allen-headed screws, and pop them through like that. Take our Allen socket here and once we get all of them started we’ll fully tighten our recessed nut cap.
[28:40] Now we’ll head to the press to start pressing in some studs.
We’ll grab our M10x1.25 studs out of the stud kit and our hub rotor assembly. As you can see here, there’s a little triangle cutout. There will be two holes right next to each other and a third that’s kind of off by itself. You’ll want to follow the pattern all the way around and then that third one that’s off by itself, that’s what we’re gonna put our studs on, because we’re working on the Can-Am today.
We’re gonna get our studs lined up in the hole. Take a socket or something that’s gonna press it in nice and easy.
Then we’re gonna repeat these steps for the rest of these four, and then the rest of the three.
Before we put our hub rotor assembly on, we’ll make sure this bolt right here and this bolt right here are torqued to the proper torque settings. Once we’ve done that, we’ll slide our hub rotor assembly onto the output shaft of the portal.
We already have it on there. We’ll take our castle nut and thread it all the way on there. We don’t need to fully tighten it just yet. We’re gonna grab our driver’s side brake caliper. Remember, I said earlier that we would be switching my calipers.
We don’t have a brake line hooked up yet. I find it just makes it a little bit easier when you get more out your brake lines. We’ll just use our factory hardware to secure our caliper to the CMP.
[30:17] We’ll take our bolt out of our caliper that was stuck in there, just to keep some of the brake fluid from running out. We’ve got our brake line down here so we’ll just take our banjo bolt and stick it through the brake line. Then make sure we stick our copper washer on the back side.
Then we’ll run our brake line to the point where we can get it installed to the caliper.
Once we have that taken care of, we’ll grab our brake line clips that are provided in the hardware kit, as well as the hardware for the brake line clip. It’ll be the really small Allen-headed hardware in the kit.
Then we’ll come over here to the steering arm. There’s gonna be a tapped hole right here and right here on the backing plate. So we’ll slide this over top of our line, get the hardware started, and then do the exact same for right here, and then on the bottom side.
On the bottom side we’re going to use our factory hardware as well as the factory clip off the factory brake line to secure it.
The next thing we’ll do is hook up our tire on here. Fully tighten our brake caliper bolts as well as our banjo bolt. We’ll want to tighten this to at least 300 ft./lbs. and then make sure we line up the cotter key hole and install our cotter key.
Go through and make sure our brake lines are nice and tidied up. Then we’ll head to the rear and get our portals installed back there.
[32:08] The next thing we’ll do is grab our rear backing plate. We’ll go ahead and put some bushings in. You can either use your factory bushings, but we decided to upgrade today. Since we knew we would have to take them out, you know, this is just the best time to upgrade. So we went ahead and used SuperATV’s heavy-duty UHMW bushings.
Go ahead and pop all the sleeves in, as well as the bushings themselves. It’s pretty easy. Stick them in there and press them all the way in. Now take your sleeve and slide it through. A lot of times you can do it by hand, like this one—we just did it all by hand without any resistance.
Then we’re going to line this up here at the upper A-arm and we’re going to grab our factory hardware. We’ll line our axle up into our backing plate and again, we’ll just move our brake line out of the way for just a minute, until we get ready to hook it up.
We’re gonna line the lower A-arm up with the backing plate. Once we have it lined up, we’ll reinstall our factory hardware. Get our nuts installed and get our shock installed as well, while we’re at it.
[33:47] Next we’re going to grab our portal and slide it on the axle, just like we did in the front. We’ll take the axle nut and get started. Grab our M12 long bolts and stick them through. Go all the way around and continue doing that.
The next thing we’re gonna do is remove our bolt that was right here, next to our 30 or 45, depending on what percent gear reduction you have. We’ll take our CMP and get it started and into place. Then we’ll take one of our low-headed Allen screws and get it attached.
We’ll put this bolt right here through. Make sure we have nuts on everything that needs to have a nut on it.
[35:12] Then we’ll make sure we’ve already applied our blue Loctite to our axle nut. We’ve already done this so we’ll install our recessed nut cap after we’ve torqued it to the axle manufacturer’s torque specs.
Now we’re gonna grab our hub rotor assembly and get it all the way on. We’ll grab our caliper that we took from the driver’s side and slide it into position. Take all our caliper bolts and factory ones. Get those lined up and started.
We’re gonna take our castle nut and get that ran up. Then we’ll remove our bolt out of our caliper. Grab our brake line and get it reattached, just like we did on the front, except back here on the rear, we’ll only have two points where we can attach our brake line. One’s gonna be right here and then the other one’s gonna be right here.
[36:35] Once we have it attached, well go through and make sure all our hardware is fully tightened. Then we’ll repeat these steps for the opposite side.
So now that we have our portals installed to all four corners, everything’s tightened up, everything’s ready to go. Except we still need to bleed our brakes.
So we’ll go up to our master cylinder on our brake fluid reservoir. We’ll have two reservoirs on the Defender. We have both of them filled up.
We’re gonna have somebody hop in the driver’s seat of the machine and pump the brakes a few times, because we did disconnect all the brake lines. So you’ll want to continually pump them to start getting that fluid moving through the lines.
We’re gonna start farthest away from the master cylinder, so that’ll be the passenger right rear. We’re gonna take the cap off of our bleeder. So there it is, that’s the bleeder right there.
Once we know that we’re getting some fluid back to the rear, we’re gonna crack this bleeder. After we pump them about five times, after the fluid’s already been pushed back to the rear, we’re gonna continually do that until we get all the air out of this caliper.
Then we’ll jump over her to the driver’s side and then jump back to the passenger’s side front.
[37:58] You just want to make sure you get all of the air out of the lines. On side-by-sides, it can take some time. I highly recommend that you get an air bleeder to do this. It just takes about half as long. It’s super effective, and it’s the way I’m gonna do it.
So then you’ll just go through and reinstall all your components.
And that’s how super easy it is to install SuperATV’s 6″ GDP Portals on this Can-Am Defender. For more information on these GDP portals or any of SuperATV’s great products, feel free to give us a call at 855-743-3427 or check us out online at SuperATV.com. Thanks for watching and we’ll catch you next time.
