Poor Brakes

[Doughnuts]

Hello everybody.

I have been having problems with the brakes all summer so now that its cold outside I decided to fix them. The problem originated when I changed the brakes last spring. Everything went normal till I decided to hit the brakes with the lid off the master cylinder. Wound up replacing front two calipers and a master cylinder and removing the silly rear wheel anti lock brake thing. Only to find out I installed the passenger caliper wrong and miss threaded it. So after fixing that, the brakes finally worked. But they pulled to the right. I did not feel like spending another week on them and blew it off. Well 5 thousand miles later I need to replace, you guessed it, the passenger brake pads. So after replacing them and screwing with the caliper it doesn't pull to the right anymore. Only problem now is it won't stop worth a darn.

So any advice before I sell my kidney and spend this weekend working on it?

 

[michael hurd]

Yep. Take it to a shop that can perform a pressure bleeding with a scan tool to activate the ABS system.

 

[90halfton]

What year of truck?

 

[east302]

...and removing the silly rear wheel anti lock brake thing.

What did you remove...the combination valve (brake pressure modulating valve)?

At the least, you have air in it or could try adjusting the drums.

You can get a pretty good pedal with the stock system. Not great by modern standards, but not bad.




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[Ironhead]

Not wanting to sell a kidney, I ended up using a MityVac vacuum bleeder, which worked well. There are YouTubes on this. As for the ABS, I just drove on a slippery road, and slammed on the brakes, then bled again. Repeated a couple of times, and the pedal is nice and firm, and the truck stops reasonably well, considering the stock brakes are kinda marginal to start with.

 

[Doughnuts]

It's a 91. I'll try bleeding the brakes again tomorrow. Also it has no full anti-lock brakes, I believe that came out in 94, what it did have was a rear wheel anti lock brake (RAWL) system which I removed when I messed with it last time.

Did I mention that I hate brakes?

 

[90halfton]

Bleed, bleed, and bleed some more. If you have a good shop vac you can swedge down the hose and hook it to your mityvac cup. Hand gets tired of squeezing that gun after a while.

 

[Bob L]

I have had good luck just opening the bleeders and let them drip into a pan Make sure you don't let the master run out of fluid.