Archives November 2020

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage for part two of the Bullnose brake job special. Today, we’re going to be going through the rear brakes, replacing all of the brake hardware, putting on the new painted drums, adding new brake shoes, and, uh, we’re going to be cleaning up this hub. I got this wheel hub resurfacing kit here we’re going to be using to get this all nice and clean. And then once that’s clean, we’re actually going to paint it to, uh, hopefully prevent rust in the future. And then once all that’s done, we’re going to go to the other side and do the same thing. And on the other side, I have to replace the parking brake cable. So lots in store for today. Stick around. I’m going to start by taking off all the brake hardware and the brake shoes so I can get back in here, clean this stuff up, and then prep this hub for cleaning and paint. Now, to do that, I went out and got this spring compressor and I got these spring pliers. Now you can do this with a screwdriver, a wrench, and a pair of vice grips. As a matter of fact, Chris Fix has an excellent video on how to do just that. But I’ve done this before that way, and I’m not Chris Fix. I get frustrated really easy. So in order to keep my blood pressure down and keep my doctor happy, I went out and sprung for these tools. They’re not that expensive and they’re gonna make my life a whole lot easier.

Now that I’ve got this mostly cleaned up, I’m just going to hit it with a little bit of rust dissolver, just try to get it cleaned up that little bit more and get some of this rust off. So now that I’ve got this thing about as clean as I’m going to get it, I’m going to go ahead and use this wheel hub resurfacing kit to do the actual hub itself here because I’m actually going to paint this. And this is pretty simple. It’s just a piece that goes into your drill and then this sanding end screws on like that. It’s got a hole in the center so you can go over top of your lugs. So I was having a hard time keeping this from rolling around while I was working on it, so I just put some bungees on here and wrapped them around one of the bolts back here for the leaf springs just to keep it from turning while I’m trying to grind on it.

So if I sound a little strange, it’s because I’m using a face shield. You always want to wear some kind of eye protection whenever using a wire brush like this because these little wires can come flying off and get one of those into your eye, you’re having a real bad day, huh? So I’m just gonna do one final shot of brake cleaner on this just to make sure it’s completely clean. Just like with the drums and the calipers, I’ll be using high heat primer and high heat paint because these hubs could potentially get a little warm. Now it’s time for paint, same kind of stuff, high heat matte black. So if you watched my last video, then this should look familiar. All I’m going to do is put some rust remover on these parts here. These are parts that you don’t really replace, you just kind of clean them up. This is your strut parking brake lever, a little brake guide, the brake cylinder pins, and then these are the nuts that hold the brake cylinder on. So since I got them out, I may as well clean them up, and so that’s what I’m gonna do.

Here are my parts all de-rusted and ready for paint. Just like in the last episode, I’m gonna go ahead and paint these parts just to prevent them from rusting in the future. I’m just about ready to start putting this thing back together. As you can see, I’ve laid all my parts out here on the ground in about the same location that they’re gonna go up here on the wheel. I got a brake hardware kit for this. It came with all the springs and a lot of the hardware you see here, the stuff that I painted, and stuff that came off of the truck originally. You don’t get those with the kit. And also, I had to go out and get the self-adjuster and the parts for that. That didn’t come with the kit as well. Most of these hardware kits come with almost everything you’re going to need. I did not know if this hardware kit came with a strut spring, and it did, but because I didn’t know if it did or not, I went out and got my own strut springs, and these are the ones that I’m going to use because they actually match much closer to what came off the truck in the first place.

I went out and printed off a paper with the names of all the parts and where they go, and I’ve also got some pictures of the other side of the truck just as reference because while putting this together isn’t too hard, there’s a lot of parts and they all need to go in the exact right spot, so it can be a little complicated. And I don’t do this a whole lot. I’ve done it once before, it was kind of a pain in the butt, and if you don’t do it all the time, it’s easy to forget where all the parts go. So it’s always good to have a reference to know what you’re doing. So with all that out of the way, I’m ready to go in on this. I’ll move you guys off to the side so I can get in here and start putting it back together.

Okay, well here we go. This is the moment of truth right here. Dude, this thing is such an utterly humongous pain in the eyes, I can’t even, oh come on, I’m crying out loud. I don’t get it. Oh, oh my god, what an unbelievable, how the is this supposed to go in? Oh, this cord, that’s it man, there’s no way. How does that, what the hell? All right, all right, all right, calm it down, calm it down. Come on, there we go. Come on, you little bastard. All these springs like work against you. Oh, thank you. This is spring scary. Come on, that can’t be right. Come on, come on, come on. I forgot something. I forgot this, which goes behind those, so I gotta take them both out. Come on, you son of a black. How in the hell is this supposed to work? I don’t get how that’s supposed to work. There we go.

I’ve already done a whole lot of work and a lot of cussing and swearing right on the other side of the truck. And the reason that I did the entire of one side first and then came over here to do this side is so that, one, I’ve always got an assembled brake system to look at so that even if my diagrams or my images fail me, I can always come over here and look at this side to make sure I can see what’s going on and replicate it if I have to. And number two is because I haven’t done this in a while and I did a lot of learning as I went. So to spare you guys from me bumbling around when I’m trying to explain how this is done, I did one side to familiarize myself, and now I can do this side much more quickly and efficiently and actually film the process with some explanation so that you know exactly what I’m doing and why I’m doing it with as little cussing as possible, which may still be quite a bit, but we’ll see. So, uh, let’s get to it.

The first thing I’m going to do is remove these two springs. There’s one here and one here. To do that, I’m going to use this nifty little spring pliers tool. And the way that that works is that this little end here wraps around the spring and you twist it and it pulls the spring off. It’s actually a lot easier to show you than to explain. There we go. It takes a little bit of elbow grease to pull it, but this is a whole lot easier than using a pair of vice grips or a screwdriver. And there’s one spring. And now we’ll do the other. It’s a little tougher because the spring is tucked back in further, so sometimes it helps to try to pull the spring forward a little bit. There we go. And then there’s this little cable guide here that this spring goes through and then into the shoe. It’s a little tricky to get out of here. You just kind of have to wiggle it just like that. And then you’ve got the cable that actually connects down underneath here. There’s a little hook that that goes in. I’ll show you in a minute. And then this little piece here comes out. It’s just a guide. Save this because the hardware kits don’t come with this. Now you can move your shoe out and remove the stud spring and the actual stud itself. Make sure you save this. I’m actually going to clean this up and paint it. Hardware kits don’t come with this either. And here I can take out and let you see the brake cylinder pin. Again, the hardware kits don’t come with this, so you should probably save it. These actually for a pair of these, it’s like five bucks, but they don’t really break down, they just get a little bit rusty. So I’m just gonna clean them up and paint them and put them back.

Here’s that cable I was talking about. It’s hooked in back here. You really still can’t see it, but there’s a little plate back here that hooks into. Now I could undo this spring and all this stuff down here, but it’s actually easier just to go ahead and take the shoes off at this point, so that’s what the spring compressor is for. And these two springs here and here, uh, I don’t know if you can see or not, but there’s a little, um, here, you know what, let’s see. There we go. You see how the pin is going up and down, but the hole is going side to side? You got to turn that spring so that the hole lines up with a pin and you can pull it out. Sometimes it takes just a little bit of fiddling. There we go. And these springs and little caps that come on those springs you can toss because the hardware kit comes with those. And the same with these pins. Oh, that one’s actually bent. Wow. Hardware kit comes with new pins, you can toss those. Now that that’s all taken apart, the shoes just come right off. And of course, you’re going to toss your shoes, toss this spring, toss this plate. Let’s disconnect our parking brake. And then the last part, which is kind of a pain in the butt, is you get that little pin out of there, and you really just kind of have to work at it.

I moved over to the desk so you can kind of see what I’m doing and so I’ve got a little bit better spot to work in. The best way to do this is probably with a screwdriver. I’m going to use a pair of vice grips just to keep this from moving around. You don’t have to worry about damaging this because you’re going to get a new one. And of course, you’re going to toss the brake shoe, but you want to keep this piece because the hardware kit does not come with one of these. Now we’re going to disconnect the brake cylinder. That’s, uh, this stuff right here. When you’re doing this, you’re always going to want to have some kind of a rag or something because brake fluid is nasty stuff. So a rag and then also something on the ground to prevent it from getting all over your floor unless you don’t care about your floor. The first thing we’re going to do is unhook the brake line. You want to make sure that you’re using a flare nut wrench for this because these brake lines can get kind of nasty and corroded, and it’s easy to strip the nut trying to wrench on these. And if you do, then you’ve got a real problem with your brake line here, so make sure you use a flare nut wrench to do this.

Okay, and I just got the cap from a speed bleeder or one of my bleeders that I got from my kit just to put right on the end of this so it doesn’t keep leaking. There we go. You want to be careful with these bolts because they can get pretty nasty and corroded. When you put them back on later, you’re going to want to use some anti-seize, but we’ll go over that in a minute. Luckily, I live in the southwest, so rust and corrosion really isn’t much of a problem for us down here. Meth, on the other hand, what are you gonna do? And you just yank it on out of there because this is the passenger side and I’m replacing the passenger side parking brake cable. I gotta remove it, so this is where that happens. If you watch my last video, you know how these clips work, but basically, you just push these in and yank the whole cable out that way. And the only place where it’s actually connected to the chassis in any way was, uh, the first one that I’ve already removed. It was up here, a little, uh, where was it? It was up here, a little bracket, which I’ll have to put back when I’m done. But it’s also on top of the differential. There you can see a clip, so I’ve got to get it off of that. There’s a bolt that holds this clip on up here if I can get on it. That’s a half inch. There we go. Ouch. There we go.

And this here, plug it in just like all the others. Not enough slack. Okay, so after messing around with this thing, I had to take it off. The brake line just clips right into there. It clips really easy, so it was able to come out real easy. This thing is incredibly tight. I mean, you can see when I got it on there that I actually took off some of the outer coating. So, uh, I’m gonna open this up quite a bit to, uh, make it easier and go from there. Well, obviously, that’s much easier to do outside the truck. I’m a little disappointed that I, uh, screwed up my outer jacket, but it is what it is. Um, I just didn’t have the mounting position correct. I didn’t leave myself enough slack on the one side and thought that I would be able to slide this up and down through here. Obviously, I can’t do that. It’s way too tight for that. So what I’m going to go ahead and do is get it mounted onto the rear brakes and get it hooked up to the parking brake assembly. And then once it’s hooked up, I’ll put this back on there and hook it wherever it goes.

So I tried to install this, and, uh, there’s not a big enough gap here to accommodate that piece of metal there. And I’m not exactly sure what’s going on, but what I’m gonna try to do is bend these tabs out just a little bit more to make some more space so hopefully that’ll fit. And it still won’t clip in there. Do you get that feeling like nothing’s ever easy? The problem that I’m running into is that the space between this tab here and this back part of this mount point here, the space right inside of there isn’t wide enough, and I can’t bend this enough to make it wide enough because as soon as I push this through the hole, they all bend back. So my solution is a Dremel. All right, let’s see if that took care of it. Almost. I just got to bend the tabs back out. There we go.

All right, now that I’m pretty much cleaned up back here, the first step to putting it all back together is to plug in my new parking brake cable, and that goes in right there. So just as I did on the driver’s side of the truck, on the passenger side, I’ve laid everything out on the ground in sort of the location that it’s going to relatively translate up into there. I’ve also got a cheat sheet just in case I kind of forget where things go or need a quick reference. Of course, I’ve also got the other side of the truck already put together and working in case I have any questions. I can always run over there and take a look. So the first thing that I’m going to do is put my brake cylinder back in. Of course, it goes in the other way, but before you do this, you’re going to want to make sure to put some anti-seize on these bolts that hold it in because this is part of the undercarriage. A lot of times rust and corrosion can get real bad down here, and these can get pretty nasty. So when they corrode into the actual brake cylinder itself, sometimes they’re really hard to get out, and you can actually snap these.

I see what I’m doing here. As I’m sure I’ve said before, you want to make sure that when you’re putting on this brake line that you use a flare nut wrench. It’s kind of a pain to use because it’s a little slow, but it will definitely save you headache in the future if it prevents you from rounding this nut off. I’m just going to leave this rag here for now because I’m going to have to bleed this after I’m done installing everything else. Now that the brake cylinder is installed, the next thing that I’m going to do is put on some brake and caliper grease on these pads right here. You can see these raised portions. That’s where the shoe is actually going to ride on this back plate, so you want to make sure that you get some lubrication on there. You want to make sure when you’re cleaning this back plate off that you do clean these areas really well. I tried to clean the whole thing, but I could have gotten away with just cleaning these pads, but you do want to make sure that they at least are clean.

Now they’re all greased up. The first thing, uh, well, first of all, let me say that you’re going to get with most of these, you’re going to get two different shoes. One’s bigger than the other. The small one goes in front and the big one goes in the back. And that’s just, uh, the way the brakes work. There’s some fancy explanation as to why the back one should be bigger because there’s more pressure on it when you’re braking, but I don’t really know about all that stuff. All I know is that the big one goes in the back. The big one is also where you’re going to install your parking brake actuation lever. It goes in that top hole there, and it’s got this little clip that slides on. You can do it without busting your knuckles. I think it’d be kind of tight, so I got it pressed on all the way off camera. But once you got it on there, you need to take a pair of pliers and sort of bend these tabs in just to keep it from coming off.

Now that you’ve got your parking brake actuation lever on, you want to hook it up to your parking brake cable just like that. Now you’re ready to actually install the shoes, and that’s what these parts here are for. This pin comes in from the back like that. The shoe, make sure you get a little hooky thing up here. Can you go through that hole there? And then this spring and retainer goes on to the pin. So it’s kind of hard to do while trying to explain it, so I’m just going to try to get this on here on camera as best I can. There we go. So one of the hardest things about drum brakes is that everything is held on by springs, so you don’t really have anything to sort of start with to build on top of. You just have to compress the springs and get it all put together. This thing here is really, really wonky right now because none of these other springs are on here, but as you put the rest of the springs together, it’ll sort of hold everything together in tension.

So some things to not forget when you’re putting this in: don’t forget to put in your brake cylinder pins and don’t forget to put in your parking brake strut. And, uh, don’t forget to put this guide plate on the top. You also want to make sure that you don’t forget on this side here to put in this piece here that’s a guide for this cable here, which you also want to make sure not to forget to put on. And then this longer spring, here’s your other top spring. The longer spring goes on the back. It’s a kind of a pain to get in. It actually was easier than typical, so I’m gonna make sure that you got your shoe lined up and everything here is kind of ready to go. And then you can get your tool and use this long piece here with this little sort of, I can get it, this little indentation right there. The indentation goes up against this stud here so you can pull the spring on. There we go. And on this side, you’ve got this little bit beefier spring. It’s a little bit shorter and it goes up into this hole up here. And to get it on, it’s the same basic idea as the other side. The trick is getting it on without losing tension and everything else. And there we go.

The bottom of this is also pretty tricky. It involves putting on this adjuster plate, this spring, and this self-adjuster. The self-adjuster is what helps adjust your shoes out as they wear. So because this piece needs to move pretty freely, you want to make sure that you take this apart and put some anti-seize on these threads and on this cap here. Just slots right in like this. This plate here hooks into this hole right there, and the adjuster plate rides on top of the self-adjuster. The trick is that you’ve got to get this cable hooked into here after having come around the guide up top there, so it’s kind of tight. And then you also have to get this spring hooked from here into there. Now this tool that I got is supposed to make that easy, but after messing with it, I find it’s a whole lot easier just to use a pair of vice grips. There we go. And that should be a completed drum brake system with new hardware. Just do a quick inspection, make sure all your springs are tight, that your cable is going around the guide, your clip is in, that your brake cylinder pins are in, that your parking brake strut spring is incorrectly, that your, uh, see there’s an inspection issue, my self-adjuster popped out right here, so I’ve got to redo this bottom part. Huh, there we go, much better. Self-adjuster is in there correctly and that this wheel is riding just underneath this plate, which is how it does the self-adjustment.

Now to adjust the actual brake tension itself with the self-adjuster down here, let’s put the drum on if we can. Yeah, see, I won’t even go on there, which means that my shoes are out too far. There we go, it goes on there, but it’s pretty tight. You can hear it rubbing a little bit, so I’m gonna back it off just a little more. Now that I’ve got everything put together, it’s about time to test, but before I can test this, I’ve got to bleed the brakes back here because I put that new brake cylinder in. So when I disconnected the brake lines, some air could have got in there, and I just need to bleed that out to make sure there’s no air in the system. Now I’m going to have a video on exactly how to bleed brakes using speed bleeders coming up, so you don’t want to miss that.

There we go, it won’t turn it off. Fantastic. Now that I have the brake shoes, brake drums, and brake hardware on both of the rear wheels replaced, as well as the parking brake cables, the last thing to do is to adjust this parking brake assembly here so that, uh, when I put on the parking brake, the wheels won’t turn. And to do that, I’m going to tighten this nut right here, right here, just to the point where these are good and tight and make sure that with the parking brake off, my rear wheels still turn freely. And then obviously when the parking brake is on, they shouldn’t turn at all. So we’ll see if we can get there.

Okay, so it’s fairly tight. Let’s, uh, see if I can turn this wheel. And I can, so it’s a little tighter. Okay, now that’s pretty tight. Let’s see what we’re doing here. Okay, I can still move the wheel pretty feeling, but let’s, uh, take the parking brake and see what happens. Oh wow, yeah, that’s really tight actually. That may actually be a little bit too tight because that parking brake doesn’t go down all the way, but that wheel didn’t move at all. So let’s loosen this up just a little bit. I think we have it. So ladies and gentlemen, I do believe that I can claim success and say that at least in this case, I’m not as big of an idiot as I could be. So brakes are off, wheel turns, get my one man hand there, brake pushing stick, wheel doesn’t turn. But here’s the test because what I was really trying to fix was my parking brake. Okay, doesn’t turn. But last time I showed you this, I used a breaker bar. Let’s see if I can turn the breaker bar. Now that should hold the truck on a hill, but I’m not gonna know for a hundred percent certain until I finish the front brakes and, uh, actually take it out for a drive. But that’s the next episode, so make sure you stay tuned. Guys, if you learned something, if you enjoyed the video, if you had a good time, if I entertained you at least a little bit, give me a like. If you want to see what’s going to happen for the truck in the future, the front brakes, all about the speed bleeders, eventually I’m going to get to the engine. Make sure you subscribe so you can see what I’m doing. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks for watching guys, and we’ll see you next time in part three.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Obviously, the brakes are one of the most important systems in your vehicle’s operation, which is why over the course of the next few videos, I’ll be doing a complete brake job on my ’85 F-150 using all the parts that you see here. If you’d like to watch me do that and learn how to change all the brakes and the front hubs and rotors and bearings, pads, shoes, the works on an ’85 F-150 or a Bullnose in general, stick around.

So you may be wondering why I’m bothering with replacing basically everything except for the brake lines and the master cylinder and the brake booster. Well, when I was at the tire store, I had to park on an incline, and so I put the parking brake on and took my foot off the regular brake, and the truck began to roll backwards even with the parking brake fully engaged. Now, obviously, that’s a problem. So I came home and began to try to diagnose it, and no matter what adjustments I made, I just couldn’t get the rear wheels to not roll backwards with the parking brake engaged. And so I figured maybe it was time to go through the system and see if I can’t get that figured out. I figured while I was doing that, I may as well replace everything because at least with everything replaced, I’m starting fresh. I know when the last time all this stuff was replaced because I replaced it myself all at the same time, say about the truck used. So there’s no way for me to know when the last time the brakes were serviced or the hubs and rotors were serviced or when the bearings were changed. So by doing all this myself right now, I know I’m starting from a good place.

In addition to that, brake components really aren’t that expensive individually. Now, when you go out and you buy them all at the same time like this, it can get pretty pricey, but generally, they’re not that bad individually. And this also gives me an opportunity to go through and clean things up, paint a few things so that they’ll last a little bit longer and look a little bit nicer. And hopefully, after all that’s said and done, I will have fixed my parking brake problem. And if I don’t fix my parking brake problem, then at least I know it’s not the parts; it’s just me being an idiot.

The first thing that I’m going to do is actually apply the parking brake and just do some testing. Normally, you would do this with a wheel on, but I’ve already got the wheels off, so I’ll do it this way. Now the parking brake is applied, so I shouldn’t be able to turn this at all, and by hand, I can’t. But if I put just a little bit of pressure on it, I can spin it backwards. Now I can’t do it forwards at all, so what that tells me is that if this truck were parked on a hill, it’d be able to roll backwards, and that’s a problem.

I’m also going to check the operation of the regular brakes. Now, I’m a one-man show, so I don’t have anyone to check the wheels for me while I press the brake or vice versa. So what I did was I built this little wedge out of a 2×4 and an old t-shirt and just a sponge right here, and that way I can wedge this end up against the brake and put this end up against the seat and not have to worry about ripping my seat. And that way, the brake will stay down while I can go around and check all the wheels. So just like with the parking brake, I can’t really turn this even if I apply pressure. I really can’t turn it, so that’s good, except that I can turn it a little bit backwards. So at least it’s consistent. This still needs to be changed.

Here we are in the front, and the calipers are fully engaged, and there is no way that I can turn this. I’m not even going to put a breaker bar on it because I know it won’t turn. I tried this earlier with the tires on, and I couldn’t turn even using the entire tire to try to turn it. So the front brakes on this vehicle are pretty good, but I’m still going to go ahead and replace them since I’m doing everything else anyway.

When you’re checking your brakes, there are several things that you need to be on the lookout for. One of those things is ridges in your rotors. Now, this vehicle has rotors in front and drums in the back, and you just run your thumb or finger along here, and you know, man, I really can, I can feel some ridges in there. So even though I said that these brakes are good because they don’t turn, it’s probably a good idea to replace these rotors anyway. Now, you can sometimes take these off and have them turned. I’m just going to replace them. The rotors and hubs that I bought aren’t that expensive, so it’s worth it for me just to replace the whole thing.

Another thing you’re going to want to look out for is just how much meat you have left on your brake pads. And to check that, I really recommend you go out and get one of these little digital calipers. They’re pretty cheap from Harbor Freight. This one works fantastic, and it just allows you to really sort of measure exactly how much meat there is left on your pads and on your shoes. So let’s take a look. I’m going to say this right around nine millimeters right there. Again, that’s just kind of an eyeball. So for front brake pads, you really want to have at the very minimum three and a half millimeters. Really, I recommend having more than 6.5 millimeters, and I’ve got nine, so I’ve got plenty of pad on there, and I really don’t need to replace them. But again, since pads are pretty cheap and I’m doing everything else anyway, I’m just gonna go ahead and put brand new pads on.

While you’re checking out your brake system, you’re also going to want to verify proper operation of your calipers and of your drum brake hardware. But if you’re alone like I am, it’s going to be really hard to push the brake pedal and watch the caliper work or watch the drum brake hardware work. So I’ve got a trick for you that should help you out. I apologize for any shaky cam issues. Normally, I would have a tripod, but I am using my tripod for something else. So what I’ve got here is I’ve got a pad on top of my tripod pointing at my caliper, which is in camera mode, and I actually have an app for this pad which broadcasts whatever’s on the screen to my computer, which shows up on my television. Now, you could use your phone or another pad instead of a TV and computer like this. All you’ve got to do is point it to the right IP address, and whatever is being broadcasted will show up on your device. And now I can come over here, watch my TV screen, press down on my brake pedal, and watch my caliper engage. Now I can do the same thing for my rear brake hardware. Oh, look at that. Now keep in mind there’s going to be a delay between what you do and what you see just because of the latency of the connection, but at least this way you can see things actually happen as you do them. And now for the passenger side, this lets me see the parking brake operation as well.

You want to check your brake shoes and your brake drum in the back just like you check your rotor and your pad to the front. So just like the rotor, you can run your finger or thumb inside this part of the drum here where the shoes touch and see if there are any ridges. There’s a couple, a little bit of ridging right there, but it’s not too bad. This drum is actually in pretty good shape. As far as these shoes go, you can check the thickness of the shoe the same way that you check the thickness of the pad to the front with a little digital caliper. Looks like I’m at right about five millimeters or so. Now for brake shoes, you want to be greater than three and definitely greater than one and a half. One and a half is probably the minimum. Some guys will tell you that as long as you’re not running into the rivets, if these are riveted, then you’re okay. But really, I would say anything less than three is probably about time to change them. They’re not hard to change; they’re not expensive. So I would definitely do it if they’re less than three. These are right about five, but just like the front, since I’m going through and changing everything, since these are pretty cheap, I might as well go ahead and change them as well.

I’m going to actually start my work on the parking brake. So the first thing I’m going to do is get under the truck, and you can see right there is all the parking brake linkages. The driver side parking brake has already been replaced with this cable. I did that about a year ago because I was having problems back then too, and so I decided to just go ahead and replace the other two cables as well, the front cable there and the cable to the passenger side. And since I’m doing all this cable replacement, I’m just going to go ahead and take this entire assembly apart so I can take it off and put some rust remover on there and try to get this stuff as cleaned up as I can. So now we’ll just get to taking this thing apart. Remove the spring. I’m not sure I got enough slack to actually do this. No, I don’t. So I gotta turn this nut here. So this is just a 5/16. It’s a little rusty, but it’s not too bad in my case, so it’s going to come off pretty easy. I’m going to take this entire bracket off so that I can get some rust remover on it and just kind of clean it up. Let’s see if I got enough slack now. Got enough slack for that one, and enough slack for that one. So there we go. Like I said before, this one here is basically brand new, so I got no need to replace this one. Yeah, it moves just fine. But this one here, yeah, I can move it, but it’s pretty tight, so we’re going to replace it. It’s just got this clip that goes on the end here. Now I should be able to pop this off with a screwdriver.

All right, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to give myself some slack. This bracket here is closer to the rear wheel. It’s what hangs the parking brake cables up to the frame, and this here is pretty tight, so I’m going to go ahead and take this bracket off so I can get a little bit more slack to get this off of the bracket off of the hanger up front, and I’m using a half-inch ratchet for this. There we go. It’s not too bad, but a little bit rusty, so I’ll probably go ahead and put some rust remover on this piece here too. Okay, now that I’ve got some slack here, let’s see if I can get this thing off of here. You need to bend these tabs in so you can pull it on out. Easy peasy. Now this piece here is loose. I can go ahead and disconnect it and get some rust remover on there and try to get it cleaned up. I’m not sure what this piece is called, but I know I’ve looked it up, but it’s pretty expensive, so it’s going to definitely be better to clean this up and reuse it than to try to find a replacement.

If we look inside the truck, you can see where the parking brake assembly is right here. I’ve already got it unhooked, so it’s really easy to move. I’m not going to worry about that, but this is the cable here that you’ve got to replace, and it hooks in right back behind, oops, right back behind this plate right here. There’s another one of those clips. Now that’s real hard to get to. Now I could spend a bunch of time fiddle farting around trying to get that out of there, but I think what I’d rather do is just remove this entire assembly because that way I can actually get to it and get the assembly out and maybe even clean it up a little bit, lube it, and make sure that it’s good. The problem is, I don’t know if you can see it or not, it’s way back in there, but the bolts that hold this in right there, the nut is actually on the other side. So I’ve got two of those. You can’t see the other one from where I’m at. Two of those to get out. You can kind of see it there. And plus this right here to take out, I think to take this entire assembly out. Now, in order to get to those, I have to do something about this shroud right here. And so I’ve already taken some of the screws out. That’s what I got down there, and I’m going to go ahead and finish to see if I can get this shroud out of the way so I can get to those bolts. These, by the way, are 5.5 millimeter. They’re pretty small, small heads anyway.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, that right there is what I’m trying to get to, and I think I got enough room to get my hand up in there with a ratchet and take care of that. So it turns out that I’m actually an idiot, and both of these bolts are available to be ratcheted on from inside the hood, but you can’t really see it. It’s kind of dark, but yeah, there you go. So I actually didn’t have to take that shroud off at all, but live and learn. Look upon this bolt, ye mighty, and despair, for it is a 10 millimeter. Damn, is your nut back there? There it is. That’ll be fun. Well, I don’t know where it went. That’s what I get for mocking it, I suppose. There it is. Come here, you.

Okay, now this should pretty much just come out, I think. And make sure you disconnect any electrical connections. This is a pretty old truck, so just got the one right there. In my haste to remove the parking brake, I almost forgot that there is yet another clip down here, so I gotta get that out. There we go. Now I should be able to take it out from inside the cab. Okay, now let’s see if I can get this thing out of here. There it comes. So success! I don’t know if taking this entire assembly out of the truck just to get to this clip is easier than trying to get this clip off with this still installed in the truck or not, but I do know that taking this entire thing out gives me the opportunity to clean it up, to lube it up, and it also gives me the experience of taking it out of the truck. And every little thing that I can do to learn more about this truck by experience, yeah, I’ll go ahead and take that opportunity. So out it comes. Man, that is a whole lot easier to do it inside the truck, though, that’s for sure.

Okay, so there’s just a little that this goes in right inside here, so you just have to kind of manhandle it out of there. Wow, so I just learned something. If the parking brake is in the engaged position, taking this thing out is almost impossible because now I can’t get it out of there. It’s tucked underneath this bracket, but if I disengage the parking brake mechanism, oh, well, gee, easy peasy. Oh, and I’m spent.

I’ve got my station here all set up to clean and de-rust some of these parts if I can, and I’m going to start out by just kind of cleaning things off with some brake cleaner just to get started. The rust remover that I’m using is Rust-Oleum rust dissolver gel. I’ve never used it before; I have no idea how well it’ll work, but we’re going to give it a try. Now, the instructions say to get the parts wet and make sure they stay wet throughout the process, so I got a little bucket of water, and we’re going to follow the directions.

All right, so those guys are all soaked up. Now for the mechanism, I’m just going to go ahead and wet my rag and kind of dab it on here. Okay, now we let that sit for a little while and see how it works. So I sprayed the other side of my mechanism as well, and what I’ve discovered is that if you don’t mind putting in a little bit of extra elbow grease, this rust remover works pretty well. There you go, not too shabby. Here we are, rinsed off, dried off, and pretty much ready to put back in. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty impressed considering how rough it was before. Let’s see if I can get it to focus. Yeah, that’s not too bad.

So this piece right here is by far the worst piece under there. This is after one application of the rust remover. I think I’m gonna do one more, see if I can’t get the rest of this off of here, and then what I’ll probably do is paint this piece just to prevent it from rusting so much in the future. So to be honest, this was the piece that I was really concerned about in terms of rust, and here’s what I was going for: being able to just roll that nut on and off of this bolt without having to use a wrench and dealing with all that rust. Beautiful!

I’m also planning on painting my brake drums and calipers with just a high heat black spray paint, again just to keep the rust off and help them last a little bit longer. Before I do that, though, I’m going to hit them with some brake clean. They’re pretty clean, but they may still have some oil and gunk from the factory, so I just want to make sure they’re good and clean so that the paint would adhere. So obviously, before you paint brake parts, you have to make sure that you tape some areas off. So on the caliper, I want to make sure that I tape off around the piston. I don’t want to hit this boot, certainly. And then with the drums, obviously, you do not want to paint on top of the breaking surface, so I’ll just be taping all that stuff off with regular blue painter’s tape.

So here’s my first caliper all ready to go. Now, I’m not going to worry about this part here because I’m going to replace this with a speed bleeder, so the original fitting will actually act as a plug to make sure I don’t get any paint inside of here. This here is just a cap that comes right off, so I can paint over it, no problem. The hard part is the actual caliper itself with the gasket that goes around it because you definitely don’t want to paint any of that stuff there. But I’ve got a trick for you. All you’re going to need for this is a Ziploc bag and a, that’s called a rubber band. Dumbass. All you’re going to need for this is a Ziploc bag and a rubber band. You can probably see where this is going, but I’ll show you anyway.

Okay, now that you’ve got your couple of pieces of Ziploc film, we can go ahead and cover up that piston. Now, I will admit that this is a little tricky, and it takes some finagling to get this rubber band back behind in here because this gasket pretty much is right up against the caliper frame itself. So it does take a little bit of maneuvering to get it back there. You just want to be real careful when you’re doing this that you don’t pop a hole in this because then you’ll get paint on your gasket, and also that you don’t puncture your gasket using a screwdriver or anything else because then you’ll ruin the piston. And once you’ve got this all wrapped around here like this with your rubber band down inside of there, you can just go around the edge. This part here, I pull up like this, and the rest of it, you just kind of tuck in. Nobody’s ever going to see this. This is basically just for protection, so I’m not too worried about if it’s perfect or not, just as long as it’s protecting this gasket. So I’m pretty much ready for paint. I apologize for the bad lighting; it’s what you get when you shoot at five o’clock in the afternoon in November.

So I’m using two different kinds of primer. I’m using this self-etching primer for these parts that aren’t going to get warm. That’s basically the parking brake parts right there. And I’ll be using the high heat primer for the drums and the calipers because they’re going to get pretty warm, and you can’t use regular primer for that. And then for both parts, I’m just using this high heat paint; that’s because what I have. All right, let’s get to painting. I just got Q-tips in these nuts here so I don’t get paint down inside the threads.

My, so, so, so, here we are with the finished product. You can see my final coat of matte black has gone on to the drums and onto the calipers. You can see that the masking job that I did here around the piston worked out real well. There’s still a couple of little places, and especially like under the gasket, that’s not painted, but that’s okay because the gasket covers that up. You’re never going to see it, and the gas is going to protect that from most of the road grime and dirt and things that are going to cause rust and corrosion in the future. I remember my primary reason for painting these was to try to prevent rust for as long as possible on these surfaces. A secondary reason is for looks, but really, you’re not going to see much of these behind my rims anyway, and if you do see them, I want them to just sort of disappear. I don’t need really bright colors or glossy paint on these because these aren’t performance parts; they’re just basically OEM parts, and I don’t really want people to see my calipers. I just kind of want them to blend into the background, so that’s why I chose this matte black color.

All this stuff over here has been painted. The only thing that I didn’t paint, of course, was the spring because you’ll want to paint that, and then, of course, the nuts and the bolts on the threads. I didn’t paint those. Everything else put a few coats on, and I’m happy with how it turned out. I want to make sure I don’t forget before I put this back in the truck to grease all this stuff up. I’m just using some white lithium grease to grease in all the metal-to-metal contact parts. So I just wanted to note here that I took a little rag and rubbed some of the extra grease that I had on some of these parts into a little bit of this metal plating just to put a little bit of a layer on there to help prevent rust in the future. I’m not sure if it’ll do a whole lot, but I used quite a bit of grease and had some extra laying around, so I’m just using a rag to rub some of that in.

So right there is where this all goes. I’m going to start by feeding my cable down into this hole. There we go, and I can get my fully lubricated assembly in here and hook it in. Oh, you know what? Don’t forget this has got to go through here, and then there we go. And then this piece here goes into there just like that. Okay, now I got to put in that bolt right there to hold it in place while I go to the front of the truck and fix the other two bolts in. And this one’s gonna be a pain in the because I got a nut that goes on top, and I got fat hands. My dumb ass thought another under the wrong one. All right, once that’s done.

So interestingly, this aftermarket cable here is a little bit different right here, this sleeve, because the original had one big long sleeve that threaded down through inside there. This is the original cable. The aftermarket cable that I bought has two different sleeve pieces that are both about the same size as this. Now, the original sleeve went actually down into the hole in the bottom here and sort of sealed it off. I’m not entirely sure why this is a two-piece. Both of them are exactly the same; there’s this piece here and then another rubber piece just like it. I’m assuming that one of those rubber pieces sort of has to go halfway through that hole to seal it off. I’m not sure if it should be the bottom piece or the top piece, but I’m going to go into the truck and see if I can’t get the bottom piece up through there.

This is a really weird angle, but at least here you can see what I’m talking about. You see how there’s two different sleeve pieces, this bottom piece and then the top piece? So just stick it up into the truck, and what I like to do is to get one of those two pieces actually inside this hole nice and snug to prevent any kind of stuff from the outside going through the inside. And so because I’d rather not have this piece hanging down underneath and be able to slide down, I’d rather push this piece here up into the truck and then use this piece as the sealing piece. So that’s what I’m going to do. I suppose probably should say that’s what I’m going to attempt to do.

Oh, look at that! It’s not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I mean, it’s not easy; that’s not that bad. Good! So my next job is going to be snaking that cable through these holes here in the body mount. Should be simple enough. There we go. One thing you’ll notice about me if you continue watching my channel for anything at the time is that I get sidetracked really easy. So I have not yet forgot about completing the mount of the parking brake mechanism in the front of the truck, but since I had to put this cable in, I’m just going to go ahead and get it hooked up back here. So this piece here goes on like this, and then this piece here goes on like this, and then we’ve got the nut that goes on like this. Let’s see, like this. Now, there we go. All right, so now I just have to… there’s the spring. Real quick, oh, let’s do this. Start first. There we go. The long side of the spring goes toward the front. Not that I don’t think it really matters, but that’s how it came off.

All right, now the other thing I’ve got left to do is to finish mounting the mechanism in the front and replace this passenger side brake cable. Man, I tell you this, if I go through to get usable video around here, you know, guys, as an aside, I have no idea what all this crap is. Like, there’s all this stuff in here that I don’t know. Like, the truck runs fine, right? I’m not a mechanic, so I have no idea what any of this is. It’s like all tied up or taped off or something like this. There’s a set of wires that doesn’t even go anywhere; they’re just cut off, and they go up into the cab. I mean, that’s really one of the things that I’ve gotta go through this truck with and figure out all this electrical stuff because I have no idea what the people that had this truck before me even did to it.

I almost forgot to reconnect my parking brake light, which is being stubborn. There it goes. Part one of the Bullnose Garage brake job special is officially a wrap. Now, I know it doesn’t seem like I did that much other than get my hands a little bit dirty, but I did take some things apart, worked on the parking brake, got the parking brake assembly out of the front of the truck, got it all cleaned up and lubed up, changed the front parking brake cable, got some of the hardware out, got it painted, painted my brake drums, painted my calipers, started putting in the parking brake cable for the other side, and ran into the issue where you’ve got to take this apart if you want to put the parking brake cable in there. So that’s gonna be next time.

Part two of the brake job special is gonna be me going through all these rear brakes, changing the shoes, of course, the drum, taking out all this hardware, replacing it with all new stuff. I’m gonna be going through all and replacing the wheels, wheel cylinders, of course, and going through and cleaning up these hubs. It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but there’s still a fair bit of rust on here. So I got this hub wheel hub resurfacing kit from Amazon, and we’re going to try that out and see how it works. Once that’s all nice and clean, we’re going to go through and paint this up the same way I painted my drums, again just to prevent rust and corrosion for as long as possible, and put them all back together and hopefully test it out and make sure that it works.

Of course, the episode after that, we’re going to go to the front. I’m going to do rotors, hubs, wheel bearings, calipers, pads, the whole nine yards up there. So make sure you stay tuned for that. Guys, if you enjoyed this video, if you learned something new, if you’d like to support the channel, make sure you give me a like. That really helps me out. And hey, you know, if you want to make sure that you catch the rebuilding of all this stuff here, the rear brakes and the front brakes, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell so you know when I put out new videos. I’ll be doing a bunch of stuff like this. I’ve got at least two more brake videos coming out. I may have another one depending on how things go that’s sort of an offshoot of actually doing the brakes themselves. But yeah, make sure you stay tuned for that stuff. There’s a lot of stuff coming up, so looking forward to that. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we’ll see you next time in part two.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Do you like the look of white letters on tires? Well, too bad because you just can’t get them like this anymore, which means that if you want white letters like this on tires like this, you have to do it yourself with stuff like this.

Painting the letters on your tires white is pretty simple, but it does take some time and some supplies. So what I’ll do is I’ll go through the supplies that I used and how I used them to get the result that I got.

So you want to start out definitely with some good cleaner. Now this is that way is totally awesome. I got it from Dollar General for just a couple of bucks, but you could use any cleaner, degreaser, Mean Green, Simple Green, anything like that to clean around and inside these letters really, really well. You need to make sure that all the tire oil and any road oil, if they’re older tires, brake dust, that kind of stuff gets off the tire so the paint sticks real easy.

To do that, you can use a simple household sponge. Make sure it’s something you don’t care about because it’s gonna get disgusting and you’re gonna throw it away when you’re done. And then I also used just a simple rag and a small screwdriver to wrap around like this and help me get inside some of these tiny little nooks and crannies in there.

Once you’ve got it good and clean and dry and ready for paint, then you’re going to want to use an oil-based white or whatever color you want to do, but I use white, an oil-based paint pen, and this is from Sharpie. You can get these at any big box store or any art store. I got a couple of different sizes because I have wide areas and thin areas, so I found that the really wide tip worked good for the wide areas and the outline, and the thin Sharpie worked really good for inside the thinner areas.

You’re also going to want to have on hand some isopropyl alcohol, probably some Q-tips, and then this screwdriver and rag doubles also for cleanup. In case you get white somewhere you don’t want, you can put some isopropyl alcohol on a rag or a Q-tip and it’ll wipe right up, so no problem there.

Now it’s gonna take probably two, at least probably three coats of this Sharpie paint pen to get a result that you’re going to be happy with. And you can stop there, and if you want to drive the vehicle pretty much right away within 24 hours, then that’s where you’re going to want to stop. Me, I decided that I wanted to go one step further and hopefully make the job last a little bit longer and pop just a little bit more. So what I did was I went out and I bought some titanium white oil-based paint from an art store, and I went out and got this brush set, and I did one final top coat over each and every letter on all four tires using this.

One thing to note is that oil-based paint from an art store will take forever to dry. If you’re going to buy oil-based paint, make sure you get some that’s got linseed oil base because linseed oil dries one of the fastest of any of the oil-based art paints. But here we are, I’m going on two weeks that these tires have been sitting here like this after the top coat, and I can still run my finger across the top and bring up just a little bit of white paint. So it’s not a big deal for me. The truck is going to be sitting for a while. I’m doing some brake work on it, so it’s not going to be leaving the garage for probably another two weeks at least. I’m not going to be driving on it a whole lot, so it’s going to have plenty of time to dry. But if it’s a vehicle that you’re going to be driving pretty quickly or you can’t afford to have sitting around for a while, then this last step probably isn’t for you. Like I said, I did it just to get that little bit extra pop and maybe a little bit extra durability, but we’ll see how that goes.

All right, so obviously I’m already done. I’ve got it taken care of, but we’re gonna go to past Ed, who’s gonna show you how I did it. Take it away, past Ed.

The first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to jack up the back of the truck so that I can spin this tire freely and make it a little bit easier on me without having to get all the way down to the floor. And then we’ll hit this with the cleaner degreaser and use my sponge and give it a really thorough cleaning. You probably already know this, but whenever you jack up a vehicle like this, you always want to use jack stands under the axles rather than just relying on the jack itself. It’s just safer that way.

There we go. Now we can spin the tires. Just so you know, I’ve also chalked the truck in the front to make sure it doesn’t roll on me while it’s up. I’m not too worried about it, but it’s always better safe than sorry. So let’s get to cleaning. Obviously, the part that I’m worried about the most is inside the letters and those little grooves of tiny parts there. And as you can see, even straight from the tire store, it’s pretty gross, so cleaning is really important. I mean, look at that sponge. That’s just this part right here. It looks like I’m probably going to be using three sizes: fine point for getting inside these little ridges, medium point for some of the touch-up stuff in the larger areas, and then this bold point fits right inside these great big fat areas and was probably what I’ll also use to go around the top just to make these white letters here stand out a little bit more.

First thing you’ve got to do is get all these opened up, and of course, there’s no paint in the tips yet, so you’ve got to have something to push this against to get the paint out. And I’ve found that having a flat surface to do that with that you can paint down on and get some gravity flowing really helps a lot.

So, so, so, two weeks later, them white letters must give me at least 20 horsepower. You do have a couple other options besides just painting your tires like that. You could go out and get tire stickers. There’s a couple of companies that make those. They’re just rubber stickers that go right over top of the tire, and they can say whatever you want. You can also try to find tires that already have white lettering like that, but they’re pretty few and far between.

So what I chose to do was go ahead and paint them. After taking the truck out and about and bringing it back, I noticed that a lot of the paint, especially my top coat, is already starting to flake off, and I think that’s due to the tire compression. So when the truck is riding on the ground, obviously the tire compresses a little bit, and as it rolls, the bottom that touches the ground compresses and squishes a little bit. And I think that probably pops some of that paint off.

So when I painted these, the truck was up off the ground so I could spin the tire more easily to get to all the letters, and I think that’s probably what’s going on. If you look at it, you can’t really tell looking at it from this distance, so I’m kind of okay with that. We’re gonna see how long this lasts. Someday I may go ahead and get the tire stickers to put on it. If I like this look, I may decide that I don’t like it. You know, we’ll find out. But if I don’t like it, I can always take it back to the tire store and have them flip the tires around and put the black walls out and then do whatever I want. If I want the tire stickers on there, I can put tire stickers, so I don’t have to. So I got a lot of options. I don’t feel like I wasted my time. I learned a lot, and I do think it looks really nice. I’m really happy with how it turned out. We’re just gonna have to wait and see how long it lasts.

So, there you go. You have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we’ll see you next time.