Category Bullnose Garage

Hey guys, just thought I’d give you a real quick update on the condition of the truck and, uh, kind of how things are holding up after a few years. Uh, I still try to drive it every, uh, now probably about once or twice a month. Um, sometimes I drive it two or three times or five times a week just because my other truck’s in service or something else. So, uh, but yeah, it gets a fair bit of use and, uh, you know, it does pretty well.

So I just kind of wanted to, you know, it’s been about three years since I’ve done any real video work on it. Um, things like the bus in paint or, yeah, the buff job that I did and the, uh, uh, the white on the tires. Thought I’d just kind of give you an update as to how the stuff looks. So take a look. Hello.

All right, so let’s start with the wheels and the tires, specifically the white on the tires. Now, I don’t know if you guys saw my previous video where I actually did this with a white paint pen. Uh, I actually tried some white actual paint, but it didn’t work out very well. Uh, the paint pens seem to work the best. And so I’ll just go around and give you guys, uh, a quick tour. Now it’s been about, uh, two and a half or three years since I did that work to it and, uh, you should note that I haven’t really washed it in that time. Uh, this is a once or twice a month driver basically and, uh, I haven’t gone through any car washes. I haven’t done any tire cleaning, anything like that. Um, so basically just, uh, having it sit out in the elements. Now it is here in New Mexico, so there’s a lot of UV, um, a lot of really hot days. Uh, and you can see where, you know, like, like right in there in the r, there’s some spots and an O where the paint’s kind of coming out. But, you know, um, I think it actually looks really good for being three years old. I still have the paint pens in the garage. It wouldn’t take me very long to touch this up. Um, I’m actually really happy with how well it’s held up over the course of the last few years. So yeah, I think it looks really, really nice. Again, I’ll go over the other side and kind of show you them. This is the side that kind of gets more sun generally throughout the year. I started out putting, uh, wheel and tire covers on it, but I stopped doing that ’cause it’s just kind of a pain. So, but yeah, I mean, there’s a nice kind of closeup look. I mean, when you get real close, it looks ugly, right? But if you’re far enough away, like, you know, you’re with me driving on the road, it looks pretty good, you know, especially against those black tires with black rims. I mean, it looks nice this far away. So yeah, pretty happy with that, pretty happy with how well it’s worn up, uh, hold up, held up. BL.

Now, like I said, I haven’t done a lot of washing, so I don’t know what this would be like if I, if I’d gone through automatic car washes or, uh, done a lot of, uh, wheel and tire cleaning over the last few years. But, um, again, just sitting there kind of out in the sun every day, I think it’s, uh, pretty good.

All right, and now for the obvious update, which is the paint. Uh, you can see that there’s quite a bit more flaking going on now than there was. Um, I actually had a, I hate myself sometimes, I actually had a toolbox roll down the driveway and scrape against this right there. Um, you know, sometimes that happens, you’re not paying attention. It’s a, not really, but you know, but you can see that, you know, there’s some more flaking going on there and, uh, you know, some thinking going on there, a little bit of, uh, rust type stuff coming through there. Um, yeah, so the, the, uh, the buffing that I did with the, uh, trying to, yeah, you can, oh, here is, here’s a good, you can see where I, I had the, the buff go to before and now where the, the clear coat is continuing to flake away even more than it was before. You know, that’s just time, guys. This clear coat is just, it’s at the end of its life and, uh, there’s not much you can do about that, you know, except for sand it all down and repaint it. So the buffing gave me a few good months of it looking nice, um, and then it kind of went back to, to the way that it was. So, um, and this stuff back here is, is back to being really dull. It would not take much to, to sort of re-bring this out, but again, you can see here where this is actually some paint degradation here. So, uh, yeah, but as I’ve said several times, repainting this truck is in the cards, so I’m, I’m not too worried about it. It’s, it’s interesting to see the result after a few years of, uh, basically neglect. I, I don’t, I take care of the truck mechanically. I don’t really wash it very often. Um, it’s kind of a, uh, you know, backup vehicle for us right now. So once I get a nice new paint job on there, I mean, I’m, I’ll take care of that and keep it in the garage, but I’m, I’m not in that point yet. So yeah, I mean, that’s what it looks like after being out in the elements for, for three years.

All right, well there you go, guys. There’s the, uh, condition update on the Bullnose. Um, it’s again mechanically, it’s in great shape. Uh, visually it’s seen better days, but it’s not too bad, I think, considering its age and, and my lack of care over the course of the last couple years, visually anyway. Uh, you know, but I think the, the, uh, the tire lettering is a real win. Um, the buffing was a win for a while and it didn’t take very long for that to, uh, sort of go back to the way that it was before. But again, um, I learned a lot from that experience. If you guys haven’t seen those videos, go check them out, uh, where I, I, I sort of buff and shine this, this truck up and make it look way, way nicer. It was real nice for a couple of months and, um, again where I, uh, the video where I do the, the tire lettering, uh, it’s super simple to do. It takes a while ’cause it’s, it’s a pain to sit down and, and outline all the letters with pen, but, uh, I think, I think that the result is worth it. Um, so I would definitely do it again. As a matter of fact, I will probably go back and do these again at some point, uh, when I clean the truck up again, you know, at some point in the next five or ten years. Uh, yeah, so all right, uh, thanks again for watching, guys. We will see you next time.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. And this is not a Bullnose, but it is my wife’s car. It’s a 2013 Ford Explorer, and as you can see, there’s something missing. So about a little over a year ago, we went on a little vacation up to the Grand Canyon just for a couple of days. And going through Tucson, we went through some, uh, really rough construction. And then on the other end of town, we stopped to get some gas. And when I got out, I noticed we were missing a hubcap. Now, who knows where we lost this thing? It’s probably on the side of the road somewhere. Even today, my wife looked at this and saw an annoyance. We were gonna have to pay money to get a new hubcap and get it put on. I saw it as an opportunity for customization. I’ll be using this stuff here to achieve the look that I want for these rims, which is basically to look kind of like a police vehicle. Now, I’m not doing it so that I look like a police vehicle. I’m doing it because I like the way that black rims with center caps and trim rings look. And if you’ve watched any of my videos before, you already know that about me.

So what we’re using is this wire wheel on this big old grinder. Hopefully, that’ll make quick work of getting this rim cleaned up. I’ve got some automotive primer here just to get a good base layer. I’ve got high heat paint because that’s what I have. I have a whole bunch of it. But the important thing about this is that it’s matte paint. So I’m also using a 2K Spray Max clear coat. And if you’re going to use a clear coat over top of a base coat, you want to make sure that your base coat is a matte finish and not glossy because if it’s glossy, then your clear coat won’t adhere correctly. So this should be interesting. I’ve never used a 2K clear before. This will be the first time. I’m really interested to see just how that’s going to turn out.

So keep in mind, this is basically just a driveway paint job. I’m not going for super professional results, but, uh, I’m hoping that it turns out nice and, uh, sort of dresses up my wife’s vehicle just a little bit. So first thing to do is to get the vehicle up in the air, get all the wheels and tires off, and then I’m going to go through and remove all of these wheel weights so that we can get a nice, even clean finish all the way around. And then when we’re all done and everything’s put back together, we’ll just take it over to Discount Tire and get it rebalanced because generally, they do that for free, and we always get our tires from there anyway, so it’s a good deal.

Now, so I picked up this trick from some other YouTube videos I watched about painting rims with the tires still on. They used index cards to mask off the tire by placing them in the rim, but I’m using old wedding invitations. We had a bunch of them laying around. I guess we don’t have as many friends as we thought we did. Got the wheels and tires off the Explorer into the garage. The wheels are just about as clean as I’m prepared to get them, so that means we’re ready to start the painting process, which means I’m going to start with my automotive primer. So the plan for this is to put down one good coat on all four wheels, and then about the time that I’m done with all four, the first one should be ready for a second coat. So I’ll just do another round, get them all coated again, and then this primer is gonna need to dry for about 45 minutes or so before I put on my base coat.

So the base coat, again, is this high heat black Rust-Oleum matte spray paint, and that’s going to have two coats. So I’ll go around the exact same way as I did with the primer. And once the, uh, the base coat is on, then I’ve only got about 30 minutes or so before I want to put on my 2K clear. So you don’t want the base coat to dry completely before you put the 2K clear on because you want that good chemical bond. You want them to sort of bond together before the base coat is completely cured. So the base coat needs to be dry but not completely cured. So if you can touch it and you know it’s not tacky, then that’s about the time that you want to put your 2K clear on.

I may have a little bit more time today than normal. It’s a little chilly out. It’s about 60 degrees in the garage. So when I get to the 2K clear, I’ll go over a little bit more exactly how this works. It’s a little bit different than a rattle can because it actually is a two-part clear coat just like you get out of a spray gun, except it’s in a can. So, uh, it goes on a little bit different and works a little bit different. So we’ll talk about that when I get to that point.

So, so, so, so while I’m waiting for the base coat of my rims to dry up a little bit, let’s talk about this Spray Max 2K clear coat that I got. Now, I got this because it’s an, actually, it’s a two-part clear coat just like you’d get out of a regular air spray gun, only it’s conveniently in a rattle can. Um, and it should provide a nice long-lasting clear coat finish to these rims so I don’t have to worry about things coming up on the road and chipping them or giving any other kind of problems, at least not above and beyond what you get on a normal car finish because basically that’s what this is. So I wanted this for the durability and the, uh, you know, lasting longer than just like an off-the-shelf rattle can clear coat.

So the way this works is there’s this little cap on top, and you actually, uh, put this on the bottom there, hit it with the palm of your hand, and that breaks open the seal inside which mixes the two parts. Give it a good shake for a while, and you’re good to go. Now, when you’re spraying this, whenever you’re spraying paint, you always want to, uh, keep your hand in constant motion. You never want to stop, and if you’re gonna stop, you’ll let off so that you don’t create big splotches when you’re, uh, you’re doing your spray. But this is a little bit different than a regular rattle can. A rattle can, you go kind of quick. Uh, this you want long, deliberate strokes, much more like you’re doing, um, a regular spray gun because that’s basically what this stuff is.

If you’ve watched any of my videos in the past, there will have been times that you’ve seen me do some spray painting without a respirator, and that’s either because, quite frankly, I forgot or because I was outside and didn’t feel like I needed one. But in the case of this stuff, no matter where you’re at, no matter how well-ventilated your room is, you want to make sure that you’re wearing a respirator because this stuff is no joke. It’s serious stuff, just like the stuff that you put on a car in a spray booth. And so you’d never see those guys spraying without a respirator. You never want to spray this stuff without a respirator. I will definitely have my respirator on. Word to the wise, just, uh, it’s okay to get away without a respirator if you’re doing regular spray paint for a little while. Not with this stuff, so make sure you got one on.

We’re just about ready for this. Um, I’m letting these dry a little bit more. It’s taking quite a bit longer for these to dry than I expect. I think that’s probably because of the temperature, and I did put quite a heavy top coat on here. So I just want to make sure that there’s no more of these little tacky spots like you can see right here. They’re almost gone. I’m just about ready to put this on. One of the nice things about matte spray paint is that you can very clearly see when it’s dry and when it’s not. So even though this stuff here isn’t tacky anymore, uh, it’s definitely not fully cured. So I should still get a good chemical bond with my 2K clear. I just want to make sure that I don’t clear over this stuff. It’s still a little bit wet and sort of seal in that wetness and, uh, make it so that it never dries. I’m not sure if that’s even a thing, but, uh, I want to make sure that that’s not a thing that I’ve got to worry about. So we’re letting it dry. I think I probably got about five or ten more minutes, and then we’re good to go.

Okay, here we go. Okay, so now we’ll let that tack for about 10 minutes. Do it again. Okay, here we go, round two. So, so, all right, got my wheels and tires all done, back from the tire store, balanced and, uh, ready to put back on the Explorer. I think they look pretty good for, uh, an amateur garage black rim paint job. I’m pretty happy. There’s a few spots where the, uh, clear coat didn’t go on real smooth, and I think that’s just because of the angle that I was spraying at and just unfamiliarity with the process. But overall, I’m real happy. Out here, just about ready to put the wheels on the Explorer. I wanted to go over real quick exactly what I’m doing here.

So I went out and I got some center caps from a 2002 to 2005 Explorer. Now, this is a 2013, so obviously these aren’t meant to go on here, but I think they’re gonna look really good in the center of these black wheels. And to get these to work correctly, I had to go out and get lug nuts that actually allow for these to clip on. So these, um, actually clip onto the lug nuts themselves. They go back here, and there’s a little clip that goes in. So you have to make sure that if you’re going to do this with these particular center caps that you get the right lug nuts. So I had to get a set of new lug nuts for all four wheels, but they aren’t that expensive. I think it’s going to look nice. I will put the part numbers for these lug nuts and these center caps in the description of the video. You’re going to have to go to eBay probably to get the center caps, but the lug nuts that you can get from just about any auto parts store.

And then once that’s all done, of course, if you know me, I love trim rings, so we’re gonna put trim rings on all four wheels. But, uh, we’ll do that when everything’s done. I’ll save the trim rings for last because I am kind of curious how these wheels are gonna look on the vehicle without the trim rings, with just the center caps on them. Okay, I’m really looking forward to seeing how these rims finally look on this vehicle, so let’s get them on.

If your goal for this project is to make your rims most closely replicate what a police Explorer rims look like, then this is where you’re going to want to go and probably where you’re going to want to stop. This is about how they look now. The center caps aren’t exactly accurate, but the actual police Explorer center caps are a little bit more expensive than the ones that I got, so there’s that to consider. As for me, that’s not really the look that I’m going for. I like that look, but as I’ve said before, if you’ve watched any of my videos, you know that I am a sucker for trim rings, so that’s what I’m doing next.

Before you do something like this, keep in mind that the clips of the trim rings, trim rings, hello Bailey, before you do this, keep in mind that the clips on the trim rings are going to mar the paint on your rims. I don’t really care about that. Like I said, it’s a garage paint job, not a big deal, but trim rings will do that. So if you’re concerned about that, you may want to think twice about putting trim rings on your vehicle.

So, so, well, there you have it, a basically brand new set of rims for my wife’s Explorer. Now they’re not new, but they are refurbished, and I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. If you’re looking to do something similar, then maybe you, uh, could go the same route that I went. Just an old set of steel wheels with some primer black paint, a real nice 2K clear, and a little bit of bling on top. The nice thing about steel rims is that you can pretty much do whatever you want. They’re pretty cheap. You can find them in any junkyard anywhere on a whole bunch of different vehicles, and if you screw them up, oh well, just clean them up and repaint them or get another one. It’s not a big deal. And me personally, I really like the way the steelies look, especially when they’re nice and cleaned up like this.

As far as my wife is concerned, she doesn’t really care. She told me that I could paint pink polka dots on them as long as the vehicle runs okay and is safe and as long as all four wheels match. Well, at the very least, all four wheels match, and I really like the way it looks. As always, guys, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, and we will see you next time.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. If you like what you see, you should definitely stay tuned. I’m talking about the workbench. Ever since I completed my garage renovation, I’ve had a big empty space right here, and I knew that I was going to fill it someday with a workbench. I looked and looked online to try to find a workbench that would fill this space, be good and strong, and wouldn’t break the budget, and they’re just not out there. If you want something that’s good and strong and big, then you’re looking at probably $500, maybe $1,000, maybe even more for something like that. So I knew I was going to have to build it myself.

The problem is that it was gonna have to be strong enough and big enough that if I wanted to do a transmission rebuild, I could throw a transmission on here, or if I wanted to change gears, I could throw a differential up here, or maybe I could put an entire dash up here and refurbish that. There’s a lot of reasons that I needed something strong, sturdy, and big, and this is what I came up with. All told, this is probably about $250. Now, that’s not exactly cheap, but compared to what you would spend to get something like this off the shelf, it’s a real bargain. I got it on casters, so it’ll roll around the shop nice and easy. Right now, it’s plugged into the wall, so it won’t roll quite that easy. Got some illumination so I can see what I’m doing.

Basically, this is two sheets of three-quarter inch birch plywood cut into pieces and then sandwiched together using glue and screws for the top, and then some poplar going around for the trim pieces. This is actually bed liner, so is this up here. This piece back here is just some leftover plywood I already had. The lights and the electrical strip, so that was a no-brainer. And the only thing that I couldn’t get locally was these legs, which I got from Amazon. Now, I like them because they’re adjustable. You can actually change the position to raise the workbench up and down.

I spent quite a while in quite a bit of mental gymnastics trying to figure out exactly how I was going to get this workbench together, what materials I was going to use. I’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos, guys that build workbenches like this, but a lot of the ones that I watched were guys with woodworking tools, planers, and routers, and all kinds of stuff that I just don’t have. I’ve got some handyman stuff and some mechanic stuff, and that’s about it, and that’s all I used to put this together. So we’re gonna go to past Ed, who’s gonna show you exactly how I did this. Like I said, keep in mind I am not a woodworker or a cabinet maker. I’m just some schmoe who wanted to put a nice workbench together for as little money as possible. So there’s a few mistakes in there, but overall I hope you’ll agree I think it looks pretty damn good. So take it away.

So my plan for this workbench is to be about 72 inches wide by about 34 inches deep and right around 38 inches high, although I’m not entirely sure how high I want it quite yet, but that’s why I’ve got some adjustable feet here. I found them on Amazon. We’ll see how well they work. I’m excited to try those out. This is three-quarter inch cabinet grade birch plywood that I got from a local lumber shop. I had them cut it to the right size, but they cut it to the wrong size. It’s pretty close, but it’s not exactly right. They cut each piece individually and changed the saw measurements every time they cut, so they’re all just a little bit different. So what I’m going to have to do is put everything together and then cut it all myself.

So this is three-quarter inch plywood. I’m gonna do three layers. I bought two pieces. I got sort of a big piece here that’s gonna go on the bottom, that’s my full size, and then I’m gonna have a sort of a middle sandwiched layer that’s got some cut pieces, so two bigger cut pieces, and I’m gonna slide a couple of smaller cut pieces here in the center, cut from this piece. And then once that’s glued and screwed together, I’ll put another big full piece on top of that and glue and screw and clamp all that together, giving me a top that’s about two and a half inches thick. And then on top of that, I’m going to put this quarter inch hardboard, and the hardboard is going to serve as a layer that’s going to be sacrificial. If I ding it up, if I paint it, if I do anything weird to it, get oil on it, water on it, whatever, I can replace that piece. It’s really cheap, and that way I’m not digging into or dinging up my actual plywood.

Once I’ve got this two and a half inch slab built with my screws and my glue, I’m doing both. Just never done this before. I’d probably just be fine doing just screws, but I’m going to go ahead and use the glue as well. I’m never going to want to take this apart. I don’t ever want it to come apart, so I’m doing everything that I can to make sure it stays together. So once that big slab is together, I’m going to kind of cut all four sides to be nice and square so that everything lines up nice, and then I’ve got this poplar here that I’m going to use as edging material to go around all the edges. And I’m actually going to paint this with a bed liner. I’ve actually got bed liner somewhere else here in the garage, and I step into the house. It’s painted over concrete, but it works really well. And I’m also thinking about painting the top of my desk with the same stuff just to sort of give it a little bit more chemical resistance and just overall more durability. So that’s the plan. We’re gonna see how that works out.

Of course, once all that is done, I can put my legs on the bottom of it, and I’m also planning on building sort of a, I don’t think the word is backsplash. We were working with a workbench. I’m not sure what the term would be, but it’s a back that’ll go up against the wall so that I don’t roll screws or nuts or pencils or whatever off the back of it and have it fall onto the floor. That’ll also serve as a place where I can stick a light that’ll shine down and give me plenty of illumination for whatever I’m working on. And I’ve also got a power strip that I’m planning on putting in there. So it’s a big build, but I mean, it’s big for me. I’m not a woodworker, so I’m hoping this will all go swimmingly well. I’m sure it will not, but we shall see exactly how it goes. So I’m looking forward to getting started, so let’s get to cutting.

So the first measurement that I’ve got to make is between here and here. This is going to be my middle sandwich layer, and I’ve got to fill this gap here with wood, and I’m going to do that with this piece of wood that came off my original 4×8 sheet. I’m gonna have to cut it twice, one piece here and one piece here, and so I need to measure how wide they got to be and how long they’ve got to be to go in here. Now, I’m actually going to measure them a little bit more than the size of this gap, and that’s because if I have them sticking out a little bit here or if they push these two boards out that way just a little bit, it’s okay because, like I said, I’m gonna be cutting off all four edges at the very end anyway, so it’ll end up being even. And I’d much rather cut them too large and have to cut pieces off the end than cut them too small and create scrap wood. So that’s what we’re going to do. This is about 24 and 1/8, which I’m going to say is about 25, which means each piece needs to be 12 and a half. And this way we are exactly 34. At least he cut that part right, but I’m gonna go probably 34 and a quarter, 34, and I’ll go 34 and a half, so each piece needs to be 34 and a half.

I picked up this handy cutting guide from Lowe’s. We’re gonna see if it even is worth the money I paid for it. I don’t have a table saw, so I’m just gonna have to do all these cuts with my handy dandy circular saw. So here’s my bottom piece. All the pieces that I got are just a little bit bowed, and I think that’s probably because they sat in my garage for a little while. But it’s not a big deal. You just want to make sure that when you’re gluing this stuff together that you have the bows opposing each other. So if it bows like this, then you want to have the other one that goes like that. So that’s the, when you clamp the edges, they come down. So you want the bowie part facing each other in the middle, if that makes any sense. This piece here is of the two big pieces I’ve got, it’s the least bowed, and it’s bowing a little bit this way. That’s exaggerated, but so there’s a hump in the middle, and that’s what I want so that when I put these pieces on and get it all screwed and glued, if I clamp it and screw it right, these pieces will help form the bottom piece and remove a little bit of the bow. And then the worst bowed piece is the last piece that I have. It’s set up over here, and that’ll go on top with the bow sort of humping down in the middle, and then that when I clamp it around the edges, it’ll bring it down into shape, and the screwing and gluing should take care of all of that.

The next job is to get these pieces laid out exactly how I want them as the middle part of my sandwich, and I didn’t do a great job cutting these middle pieces square, and I think that’s because it looks good there, but when I put this piece in, yeah, you can see a great big warp right there. So I think I’m going to flip this around that way, and I got a gap right here. And the reason I think is because I used that guide, but I had both sides of the guide clamped, but it was such a long run that I think the center of the guide bowed a little bit, and so I kind of curved as I was going through. And that’s one of the reasons why I used the guide early on, so that I can figure out how to solve issues like this later on. So let me bring this in so you can take a look at what I’m talking about. Here’s the guide that I used, and you can see that it’s got this little joiner in the middle that joins the two pieces together. Then you screw it down to get it nice and tight. The problem is that this piece here still flexes even back and forth this way just a little bit, so I think as I was moving along with my saw, this probably flexed a little and caused this little bit of a curvature as I was cutting it. So to solve that next time I use this, I’ll probably screw a block right here to the, you know, on the back of this to keep this from moving at all. I’ll get this exactly where I want it, screw a block down and prevent this from moving, and then of course I’ll clamp the ends, and that way no matter how much pressure I put on this as I’m going along, it won’t move.

I think that’s probably what happened. I used the laser level to give me some nice straight lines I could make my marks from. I wanted plenty of screws to make sure the top was going to stay together forever, especially considering the middle layer was in four pieces. Placing screws in predictable locations is important since I didn’t want to bump into any of these later when I put my final piece of plywood on. So I pre-drilled my holes using a countersink bit. Probably overkill and plywood, but you want to make sure not to skip this step. If you’re using something like MDF, countersinking the holes will prevent the material from bulging when you set the screws, which makes sure you have a nice flat surface to glue.

I got my pilot holes all drilled, my wood’s all cleaned up and ready to go, so now I’m going to do my first set of gluing and screwing. I’m only going to do half at a time of this center layer so that I don’t have to worry about my glue setting up too quickly and giving me problems. Now, I’ve never done this before, but I went and got this little bottle that’s supposed to be for rolling glue on, so we’re gonna see how it works. Okay, maybe we’ll go the wrong way. Oh, there’s that. That’s it, I’m going the wrong direction. The spout should be on top. Now the roar that I’ve read says that you should do this from the center out so that you push the glue from the center toward the outside of the boards. I actually used coarse thread drywall screws for this. They’re perfect because they grip well, don’t move too much material, and I had them lying around. I used one and a quarter inch screws so I would only go into two sheets of plywood.

So this roller is okay, but I think once I run out of the juice inside of here, I’m just going to pour it on with the bottle and then use the roller to roll it. That coming out of this bottle is not super great. As a matter of fact, I’m just gonna do that. Yeah, can’t say that I recommend this roller. It’s what I have, so it’s what I’ll use, but I think if I had to do it over again, I’d use a squeegee or maybe even like a credit card kind of thing. So more round two of gluing and screwing is complete. I’ve got my entire middle part of the sandwich all glued and screwed together, and I got the clamps around the outside just because I can. One thing to note about this whole endeavor is that this is a mechanics workbench. This is not a woodworker’s workbench. If they were a woodworker’s workbench, I would not be doing it this way. In fact, I wouldn’t be doing it at all because woodworkers’ workbenches have much tighter tolerances, and they’ve got to be completely flat, and there’s a lot of things to consider with a mechanics workbench. I just need a surface to be able to pound on, and so that’s really all this is. Like I said, I probably don’t even need the glue, but I’m using it anyway, so you know, if it doesn’t set up right or it doesn’t glue perfectly, then you know, who’s ever gonna know because it’s screwed together.

So the same goes with the sort of fit and finish. I mean, not all of these edges are perfect. Certainly, there’s some gaps and stuff in there, so I’m going to fill some of it in with some wood putty and sand it down before I do my next round, and that’s about all there is to it. So we’re going to let this set up and cure, and then I will be back to do round three. The bottom piece is gonna go on next. I’m gonna do that all as one big piece, so we’re gonna screw that up or screw it up. That’s kind of funny. So what about the pilot holes in there? I’m going to pour a bunch of glue on this, and I’m going to use a squeegee or something next time. This, I, I’m sorry, this little contraption here, this might be good for arts and crafts or something. It is not good for something like this. It just, the volume of glue is not good. The roller doesn’t work very well. I’m just gonna throw it in the garbage. So next time, we’re just gonna pop the cap on the glue bottle, pour it on, and then just squeegee it up and plop the new piece on, and that should be a lot quicker and easier, and I should be able to get that piece on before the glue starts to set because I think I noticed this last time that some of this glue was starting to set even while I was trying to spread it out with this thing. We will see you when I come back to do the next piece.

It’s been a few hours since I glued and screwed the first set of panels. It’s more than enough time for the clamping time to have gone by on the glue that I used. The clamp time for that’s about 60 minutes, so plenty of time. So I went ahead and took the clamps off, inspected everything. Everything looks good, and I got my last piece put here on top. I should note that I also put some wood filler in and sanded things down, made it nice and smooth just to help the glue to adhere to a nice flat surface. Probably unnecessary, but I did it anyway, so there you go.

One thing to note is you want to make sure if you’re doing this that you put these holes that I’m gonna drill, the spots for these holes, make sure that they’re not lining up with any of the screw locations on the first set of panels that I glued and screwed together. You don’t want your screws running into each other. I took care of that by coming in about two inches instead of one inch, but last said I did one inch from the edge. This set I did two inches from the edge, and I made sure that none of my lines going through the middle here are going to match any of the lines on the previous two panels that I did, so should be good to go. Good to go. I’m gonna go ahead and pre-drill all my holes. Once those are all done, I’ll get this cleaned up, take it off, slap down my glue, pop this panel on, get it clamped down, get it screwed, and let it sit overnight, and then tomorrow we can come back and attack it again.

So, so, so do the following day. Here we are one day later. My slab is about as solid as it’s ever going to be, and so now I’m going to take my piece of hardboard and put it on what is going to be the top of my workbench, get it screwed down. I’m only going to use about like eight screws around the perimeter just to keep it from going anywhere, and then I will cut the entire thing all together, all four sides, so that everything is the exact same size. Do now I’m about ready to cut. What I’m going to do to prevent this guide from wiggling is screw down a board right here to prevent it from moving in as I’m pushing the saw up against it. So I’ve got my measurements for both ends and here in the middle. Let me just verify my measurement here because this is the bottom of my table. I don’t really care if I’ve got some extra screw holes in there. It’s way more important to me that I’m straight on this cut, and I don’t have to worry about this thing moving. Moment of truth right here. So it looks really straight. I’m really happy with that. The only issue is that the blade isn’t quite deep enough to go all the way through the hardboard on the bottom of this, so I’m just going to, I’ve got a little multi-tool that’s got a little tiny saw blade knot that I can go through and just sort of clean that up. Oh, all right, there’s one side cut and even up. Well, there it is, a mostly squared off tabletop. Yeah, I’m pretty happy with that.

The only thing left for me to do now is to cut my trim pieces. I’m going to use this chop saw for that since they’re kind of thin. So hopefully you can hear me talk to you. It’s pretty windy outside, but such a great when you live in southern New Mexico. So here we go. Here we are back in the garage. Everything is cut. All of my trim pieces are laid out and ready for paint. While I’m painting them, I’m going to go ahead and also paint the top of this desk. It’s seen better days, and there’s pretty much nothing I could do to it that would make it worse, so we’re going to put some truck bed liner on it and see how that works. This is just Rust-Oleum truck bed coating. Got it from Walmart, and then I’m using a Zinsser Bullseye 123 primer. I’ve had a look with that in the past, so that’s what we’re using for all this stuff, and let’s get to it.

So I love this bed liner from Rust-Oleum, but I had a hell of a time with the cans clogging up. If you look at reviews for this brand, you’ll see I’m not alone. Clogging is the number one complaint. In fact, I had such a problem that I thought I might need to throw several full cans away because I just couldn’t get any paint out. The solution turned out to be a combination of brake cleaner and a small pick set. I used brake cleaner to clean out the caps and the stems on the cans when they would inevitably clog, then used the pick to enlarge the hole in the caps. This allowed me to get enough paint out to finish the job, but next time I’ll just get the roll-on stuff.

I just used regular deck screws to secure the back to the top of the table since nobody will ever see it. The blue line I snapped lines up with a plywood edge on the other side so I can see where the screws need to be. We’re to the point in the build where I’m going to put on the legs, so I want to talk a little bit about what these are. I found these on Amazon. They’re table legs meant for this purpose. They also move up and down, if I can get them to move. There we go. So they’re adjustable height. Now, there’s only like three or four different settings that you can put them on. It’s based on where you put the bolt through. I’m not entirely sure how high I want this yet, so I’m just gonna mount these and get them on and see where the height puts me at.

I also went out and bought a set of heavy-duty casters. These are like 20 bucks at Home Depot. They’re made for a wire rack, but they’ll work fine for this. For the most part, you have to drill out, so there’s holes in the bottom of these that’s actually meant for feet that come with the legs, which is a little screwable leveling feet that come with them. I’m not going to use those. I’m going to drill these holes out a little bit bigger with a stepper bit, and then I’m going to put these casters on so that I can move my table around wherever I want it. It means this kit, this set of four comes with two locking casters and two were just regular swivel casters, so this should work out perfect.

The first thing I need to do is actually drill these holes out. I don’t want to have to be doing something like this, so I’m going to take these off of here, get these holes drilled out, get these casters mounted, and then once they’re on there, I can get the entire leg assembly put on to the table. So like a full 40 percent of any of my videos is like just me looking for that. I can’t find, I mean, around here somewhere, I just used it. As you can see, I’ve got the table flipped over and on its legs, got the casters put on, rolled it around the garage a little bit. It works really well. I’m super happy with it.

So the next thing to do is to finish building out all of the trim pieces in this little backsplash cubby area, and it’s going to be hard for you to see, but right here I’ve got my laser level set up in a straight line directly down the center of this board so I can mark exactly where my screws are going to go. I’m using these humongous lag bolt screws because I think they’re gonna look nice. It’s kind of for decoration. I don’t need anything this humongous just to hold this one piece of trim on, but I think it’s gonna look nice, and it’ll definitely hold it in there, so not to worry about it.

So I want to make sure that when I do this that I drill pilot holes. That’s why I’m marking everything right now because when you’re putting something this big into the side of a piece of plywood, you definitely want to do pilot holes. Even if there’s as much meat as there is right here now, even with a pilot hole, I would never attempt to put something this large into just the side of a single three-quarter inch piece of plywood. But since I’ve got all these stacked together and they’re all one solid piece essentially, I think I can get away with this. So I used my countersink with a small drill bit to set the initial hole locations for the trim and then went back to drill out a much larger pilot hole in the plywood edge for the actual lag screw. I used clamps just to keep the top of the trim even with the top of the workbench.

So for the back cubby, I used construction screws that looked very similar to the lag screws I used for the front and sides, just much smaller. Drilling pilot holes for this was critical since I was joining the trim to the edge of a single piece of three-quarter inch plywood. I was a little afraid that I might create bulges in the plywood this way, but everything went together without a problem.

So do, do, man am I glad this workbench is finally done. It pretty much puts a cap on my entire garage renovation. It was the last thing that I had planned to do and needed to get in here to say that my garage is basically done, and it gives me a really, really great space to do any kind of work on any kind of parts I could imagine for the truck. Now, I know this isn’t really a Bullnose episode, and you know I’m kind of all about that, but it is about the garage, and this is Bullnose Garage, so there’s going to be some videos about the garage interspersed in there, so that’s what this is for.

You know, I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos, and I saw a lot of guys putting together workbenches kind of like this, but I didn’t see anyone who put one together that was relatively inexpensive, had adjustable legs so you can move it up and down, and just with the route that I was going to go, which is laminating some plywood with a hardboard top for durability and then some nice little accent touches. You know, I really like this bed liner that’s really neat. I like it enough that I put it on my desk too, so obviously I’m a fan of that. Yeah, I just, I’m just so happy with how it turned out. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys. We will see you next time.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. If your truck is anything like mine, and you got a big gaping hole right here where an emblem ought to be. Now, a lot of trucks, especially the ones, well, I mean obviously the ones after, I think it’s ’82 or maybe ’83, I came right off the top of my head, have emblems in the grill just like this. Ford did this for a lot of years up into the present day, and before that, they had the four letters were up here on the hood. But if you’ve got an older truck like mine, then it’s a pretty good bet that your emblem up here is either gone or cracked or faded or terrible or ugly or whatever it is. So today I’m gonna solve that. I’m also going to get some nifty chrome stickers put on my wheel center caps to dress them up a little bit, so that’ll be fun. I’m really looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

On my ’85, the front grille emblem is about six and three-quarters inches, and so I went out and what I did was I found a seven-inch because this actual chrome part back here is about seven inches. I got this from eBay, and I had to go to eBay to get it, but when I’m done, that should just stick right on top of there and dress up a little bit. I got black instead of blue just because I’ve already got some black accents, and I think that’ll stand out a little bit better. So, but what I got to do first is get this old sticker backing plate off of there, and we’ll just use a screwdriver for that. There are a couple of clips back behind here that hold this on. They’re basically impossible to get to by reaching down in here. Now, I’m not going to reuse this piece, so I’m just going to bust it off, and there we go. Now that’s off of there. Very important that you get it clean so the adhesive will adhere correctly. So let me get my… just using some isopropyl alcohol for this. Shines it up real nice. And now this just sticks on. The trick is getting it straight and in the right spot. That looks pretty good. Push that on there and then take off the protective plastic. And there we go, a beautiful new black Ford logo stuck under my grill. Looks almost factory, and it sure looks a whole lot better than that big black hole I had on there earlier. Hey, even matches my license plate.

I got these nice Ford center cap stickers from houseofgraphics.com, and now they’re not sponsoring this video or giving me any kind of a discount or anything. I bought these with my own money. But the reason that I’m highlighting them a little bit is because I looked all over the place for something like this, and these center caps are kind of a strange size. There, let’s see if I can… there we go. The center part here between the ridges is 50 millimeters, which is kind of an odd size, and you don’t make anything that fits that, any kind of a stock configuration anywhere. So I had to go out and find some place that would make them custom, and I actually was working with a different place than house of graphics that does this same sort of thing, but man, they just weren’t very communicative, and I really couldn’t get a hold of them. And they took days to get back to me through an email, and then I finally gave them my phone number so I could talk to them, and they just never got back to me. It was terrible. I got to tell you, house of graphics, I emailed these guys on a Saturday evening. They got back to me Saturday night, and these were in the mail by Monday morning. So, you know, kudos to them for getting this thing out as quick as possible. It’s exactly what I wanted.

Now you see there’s a little bit of a texture on these. What I’m looking for was chrome and then black, and this texture is because of the transfer paper that’s on top here. So that will go away when I peel it, at least I hope it will. And so there we go. They, I only need four, they sent me six, I guess a couple just in case I screwed up. The only thing that I’m not a huge fan of with this is that they’re all sort of on the same sheet, so I’ve got to cut them out. I was kind of hoping that they would be in the actual same size circle as what I’m going to apply them, so I could just like put them on top of the… like I could just like put it on here to verify the fit before I actually peel the backing tape off. But that’s not a big deal. We’re going to figure out how to make it work. First thing I’m going to do is cut all of these out. Well, at least four of them so that I can apply them. I’m gonna keep these two together as my backups. So yeah, we’ll keep these two together as my backups and cut out the rest.

There we go. I got a set of instructions from them, but it’s pretty self-explanatory and pretty simple. And one of the things that they say in any place that you see that sells these kind of things tell you is that you need to make sure that the surface that you’re sticking things onto is extremely clean, as clean as possible. So that’s why I’m going to be using rubbing alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, to clean these off. Keep that on there, let it dry. You could do this while these are actually on the vehicle. I just happen to have my wheels off because I’m doing a brake job right now, so I figure while the wheels are off, that’s a good time to do this because it’d be a whole lot easier to do this with these off the vehicle. There we go, that’s about as clear as we’re going to get. So that’s what we’re going for. So what it says to do, which should be self-explanatory, is to remove this backing paper from the decal. I don’t have much in the way of fingernails, but see if I can get this done. Okay, okay, it should come up with the transfer paper, and now I can kind of see where it’s going to go. I’m going to move you a little bit this way so I can get this closer to what I’m doing, so I can get kind of right over top of it and see what’s going on here. My ability to center things is terrible, so I’m trying to get this as close as I possibly can without destroying the sticker. Okay, well, that’s… that looks like that’s where it’s gonna go, so we’re gonna go ahead and put it down there. Yeah, see, I’m a little off. I’m a little off. We’re gonna see how this goes. Uh, okay, now I got a couple extra of these, so if I’m not happy with this, I can always do it again. I got quite a few bubbles in there. It’s not great because I got a lot of bubbles in there. You can see them pretty clearly, but we’re gonna do another one and see if I can get any better at it. And if I have to come back and redo this one, I can. This time I’m going to start down here and push up this way with my finger. Much better. Oh, now that one looks like I know what I’m doing. There we go, nice. Now it really doesn’t matter which direction the Ford logo is going, but just want to make it facing me just because it’s nicer that way, I guess, from where I’m sitting. The hard part is lining this up inside the circle. Oh, nice. And the instructions say when you pull it, you pull it back like this, not up. Beautiful, stuck down all around the edge. Oh man, that’s nice.

So there’s two kind of… and a half. I think I’m gonna redo this one, but we’re gonna see how this last one here goes before I decide to redo this one. I’ve only got two spares. By the way, the first company that I contacted would not give me a spare. Well, I mean, I have to pay extra for a spare. So the fact that house of graphics just sent me two spares for free basically is amazing. And I should note that they didn’t have this particular graphic that I wanted in their stock. I had to specially request it because I wanted specifically a black Ford logo with that oval. I’ll really do this on here and I’ll tell you what I’m talking about. Nice, nice, nice. Oh, I’m so happy with that. So specifically what I asked them for, let me get it up here so you can see it, was the Ford logo in black with the chrome oval sort of outline around it, and then the Ford letters also in chrome. And what I did was I actually found a set of caps online that had that look but were the wrong size, and so I sent the guys at house of graphics a link to those caps and said, could you make me a sticker that would replicate this cap? And within a day, they had this sticker inside their little graphics program on their computer at their place and sent me a screenshot of what they’d done and made sure that I was happy with it before they printed it up. And then I said it was okay, it looked good, and they printed it up and sent me this stuff. So yeah, super happy.

All right, so I’m going to redo this one because I’m not happy with those bubbles, and I’ve got a couple extra, so let’s make use of the couple extra that I have. See if I can get this off of here. Well, they stick pretty good. Now, I do know that chrome in vinyl does not last nearly as long as other colors, especially out in the sunshine, because I’ve had chrome vinyl stickers on vehicles before that just didn’t last very long out in the New Mexico sun, especially. So if this vehicle wasn’t going to be garaged like it will be, then I might be more hesitant to use chrome as a vinyl color. But because I’m keeping it in a garage and when it’s outside, I’ll be having wheel covers on it to keep this stuff out of the sun, I think this chrome is going to last quite a bit more than my other chrome, which I got about a year and a half to two years out of it, but that was on a windshield, and so it was not only was it being battered by the sun all the time, but it was also being hit with wind and dust and everything else.

So all right, let’s see if I can do this better this time. The tricky part is getting it laid inside the circle. Looks like I’m pretty close. Looking not too bad. Looking not too bad. Oh yeah, and I still got one extra. Fantastic! Look at these. Oh, that looks great. So happy with that. So happy with that. I cannot wait to see what they look like on the truck. So I just realized that that last segment that I did was actually out of focus. So, but here’s the final product. Yeah, man, I am so happy with that. That looks so good. I cannot wait to see what that looks like on the truck. Um, so yeah, I’m gonna get these wheels on, and we can see how that looks.

So, well, I gotta say, if you’re looking for a quick and easy way to spruce up the looks of your old truck or car, an emblem is a good way to go. And I’ve really got to tell you that I am super impressed with these cap emblems, and I’m super impressed with the company, house of graphics. Did a fantastic job. They look really good, they were easy to put on, they are super communicative, they got back to me basically right away, and they’re very reasonable in terms of their pricing too. So definitely, if you’re looking for a custom emblem of any kind, any kind of a sticker that goes on your vehicle, pretty much any color you want, make sure you check them out. Like I said, I am not affiliated with them, I’m not being paid by them. I just like to highlight good online companies that take care of their customers and do exactly what they say they’re going to do, and house of graphics is definitely one of those companies. Make sure you check them out. And hey, you know, if you’re looking for a good way to spruce up your vehicle, little emblems, stickers, stuff like that, it’s an easy way to go. It’s just a couple of hours of work, if that, and makes a big difference. So as always, you guys have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, and we will see you next time.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. If you’re a one-man band like I am and, uh, don’t have any friends that can help you work on your vehicle, uh, then you need to figure out ways to do things by yourself. And that’s what today’s quick tip is all about because today we’re going to be installing and using speed bleeders for the brakes.

Brake speed bleeders are pretty simple nifty little devices that just replace the bleeder valves on your calipers or on your brake cylinders, depending on if you have, uh, brake rotors or brake drums. My truck has rotors in the front and drums in the back, so I’ve got both calipers in the front and brake cylinders in the back. So I’ve got to get two different sizes of bleeder screws, and that’s what I’ve got here.

Installing them is real simple, so I’ll go ahead and get started. I’m going to be using these flare nut wrenches for this. It’s always a good idea to use flare nut wrenches when you’re dealing with brake lines or brake components. Really, I probably don’t need to use flare nut wrenches for this because these are brand new bleeders on brand new calipers and brand new brake cylinders, but it’s a good idea to get in the habit of doing that when you’re working with brakes anyway.

Make sure you don’t lose these caps when you take them out of the package. Uh, they just go on the end to prevent crud and grime from getting inside. These replacement brake cylinders that I have are 10 millimeter. They just break it loose and take the old one out and then just thread the new one in. Be careful not to cross thread. And there we go, new speed bleeders successfully installed on the brake cylinders.

These calipers are going to be basically exactly the same thing. Again, you want to be real careful when you’re putting these in that you don’t cross thread them. Here you can see two different bleeders: the speed bleeders on the left and the old bleeders on the right. The difference between a speed bleeder and a regular bleeder is that a speed bleeder has a ball valve on the inside. See, when you bleed brakes, what you do is you press the brake pedal to push all the air out of the system along with the hydraulic fluid. But when you release the brake pedal, air can come back into the system because there’s now that little bit of vacuum. So normally you’ve got to have a second person at the brake line to close the valve to prevent air from going back into the system when you release the brake.

With a speed bleeder, there’s a ball valve on the inside that does that for you. So you press the brake and then your hydraulic fluid is flushed out through the brake system. And then when you release the brake, that back pressure causes the ball valve to close, preventing air from going back into the system. That’s why you can do it with one person.

Most often, you’re going to be installing speed bleeders on parts that are already in the vehicle. I just happen to be replacing all of my brake parts, so I can have the luxury of doing it outside the vehicle, which makes it a little bit easier. But really, changing these, even with these parts installed on the vehicle, is not hard at all. These parts are meant to be accessible because you have to bleed the brakes, so taking these in and out shouldn’t be a problem.

Bleeding the brakes with speed bleeders is pretty simple. In most cases, you’ll bleed the brakes starting from the rear right and then going rear left, front right, front left. But check your vehicle manual to be sure. I’m using an old soda bottle and some clear tubing. Install the tubing into the end of the bleeder, tighten the bleeder screw all the way, and then back off one quarter to one half a turn. Now go into the vehicle and pump the brakes. You’ll want to visually see no more bubbles coming out into the clear tubing. Depending on your brake system and the work you’ve done, this could take only a few pumps or several dozen pumps.

I used a video camera to watch the bubbles and then played the video back. Once I saw a video with no bubbles, I knew the bleed was complete. One of the issues I had was that my front left bleeder screw was a bit loose in the caliper, causing air to come in around the threads and making it so that I never got a pump without air. To solve this, I tightened the screw a bit more, probably to about 1/8 of a turn from full tight, and added some Teflon tape to the threads. This allowed me to fully bleed the system, and that’s basically how to install and use speed bleeders.

Man, I gotta tell you that speed bleeders are worth every penny. It’s so nice not having to worry about finding someone to pump the brakes for you while you crack them open and shut them down again to get all the air out of your system. It’s nice just being able to, uh, do it yourself. I know sometimes it’s hard to find someone to help or to get, you know, conflicting schedules together. Especially, I mean, right now, I’m not sure when you’re watching this, but the whole COVID thing is in full swing, and it’s, uh, hard to get people to come by and help you out with projects like this.

So speed bleeders are definitely, definitely worth the money. They’re super easy to put on, they’re super easy to use, uh, they made this brake job that I’m doing on this truck a whole lot easier. Hey, you know, if you want to check out the brake job that I did on this old truck, make sure to check out those videos. I’ll have the links in the description. Uh, it’s all three parts. I did a basic brake check, changed some parking brake cables, I did the entire rear brake redo, and the entire front brakes including hubs and rotors and calipers and the whole bit. So I got videos on all that stuff.

You know, guys, if you enjoyed the video, if you learned something new, give me a like. If you want to see what I’m doing with this truck, make sure to subscribe. 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.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage for part four and what I hope is the final part of my brake job special, where I explain what all of these things on this table have in common, which is that their spoiler alert, all broken. Indulge me for a moment, friends and neighbors. I go into a little bit of story time as it pertains to the brakes on my truck.

So I did what I thought was the end of episode three. I had the rotors and the hubs replaced and everything put together. I did what I thought was a pretty good brake bleed and, uh, got the truck out on the road and embedded the brakes, which is to say that I got the truck up to 40, 45 miles an hour and braked real hard down to about five or kind of like a rolling stop. Um, you know, probably five or six, maybe seven times. Um, there’s not really a great road around here to do that on. There’s a lot of traffic right around here, but I managed to get that done and I noticed when I was doing that, the truck pulled to the left a little bit as I was braking. So obviously that’s something we have to look into. But other than that, everything seemed fine. The truck felt good. Uh, the brakes stopped the truck okay. The brake felt firm. I wasn’t having any other problems.

And then I went to try the parking brake and try to get the truck to stop on a hill. So the truck stopped on the hill with the parking brake held going both forward and backward the first time and subsequent attempts for me to check the parking brake as the truck was parked facing up a hill, so rolling backwards, which is the harder because the way drum brakes are designed, it’s actually the harder direction to stop a vehicle as it’s going backwards because of the rotation and the way the drum shoes and stuff are. But anyway, um, yeah, so holding a vehicle facing backwards on a hill is harder and subsequent times I tried it, it began to get worse and worse at holding the truck to the point where it wouldn’t hold the truck hardly at all. So I chalked that up to the cable stretching and figured I’d come back to the garage here to do some adjustment, tighten things up and, you know, take it out again and give another try.

And, uh, one of the times that I was tightening things up and pushing down on the parking brake cable, I felt something go a little loose and I thought, well, that’s weird, but nothing seemed terribly off. The brake pedal still went down and clicked okay, but it never really returned correctly. So it would, uh, it would click all the way down and then when I released the cable, it would pop back up, but it wouldn’t pop back up all the way. And I thought, man, did I just break my cable mechanism or not my cable mechanism, but the parking brake mechanism itself? Is the ratchet not working? Something like that, I didn’t know. And, uh, eventually I got to take a look at it and this cable broke. Now, obviously it didn’t break on the cable itself, but if you look at this thing, you can see right there, there’s like a bunch of plastic all kind of bunched up and nasty right there. Well, that’s this like a plastic coating that’s going around the outside of this steel braided cable and I think that this actual plastic coating snapped inside of here and made it so that I can’t, I can’t even move it like it won’t, it won’t slide in and out right there. Look, this is the new one. Yeah, no innuendo there. And again, this is the old one, nothing, right? Piece of crap.

So this is a Wagner cable. Now, I don’t want to say anything bad about the brand. I don’t know anything about Wagner, but the other cable, my new one is Brake Best, which is the O’Reilly name brand and I think it’s actually Dorman, but I don’t know for sure. Don’t quote me on that, but I think it is because all the pictures look the same as the Dorman model. And look, it’s got this nice little boot on it and there’s no plastic sheath around this cable. It’s just straight braided cable. It slides in and out really easy. So, oh, and also if you watch the first video in the series, this one here, the old one for some reason has this sort of like split loom right here and I kind of questioned why it was like that because the original only had one and that’s much closer to this new piece that I bought, which only has one there as well. So I’m really hoping that this cable works out better, but, uh, I’m also going to use some dry lube on this, I think, just to help it slide in and out a little bit better and I’m probably going to put some dry lube on the cables that are already on there, uh, just to give myself every possible chance of success.

Okay, we’ll take care of that parking cable and try to get that parking brake situation figured out. In the meantime, uh, maybe, you know, I was going back over some of the footage I took of bleeding the brakes and it didn’t look like maybe I got all of the air bubbles out. Now, ah man, when you get down toward the end, some of those bubbles are pretty microscopic and it’s hard to see. Uh, the way that I was doing it, I was using my TV with that, uh, sort of phone streaming software and the resolution just wasn’t really high enough to really see the bubbles. And once I got, um, a helper in here that could push the pedal while I actually watched the fluid flow and then also I could take video of it with my phone and play the video back to see, it’s pretty tedious, but it does work. I could very clearly see some bubbles coming out. So I thought, well, okay, I suppose maybe, uh, that’s the problem that I was having with the veering off to one side, that maybe one side wasn’t completely bled. So I went back to work trying to bleed the brakes and no matter how many times I tried, no matter what I did, I continued to get bubbles. And I’m talking I was out here all day long for one day just pumping the brake and getting bubbles and bubbles and bubbles and bubbles and bubbles.

So my next move was to get a new master cylinder. These master cylinders are not terribly expensive. It’s like 40 bucks, which I know is 40 that you shouldn’t need to have to spend, but I did to get a new one and this one’s a little worn out, so it’s actually not that bad of my, uh, idea to get a new one. And this one’s pretty gunky and stuff. Um, but when I changed my calipers, I let the reservoir pretty much run dry. So to solve that, you really need to bench bleed these and I figured, well, if I’m going to take it out of the truck anyway, yeah, I might as well replace it with a new one. So I got my new one, I got it bench bled, which we’ll see here in a minute and got it put on. So, uh, once that was done and I started bleeding the brakes, I had much better success. I got clean bleeds out of both back brakes and eventually I got a clean bleed out of the front, um, passenger side brake. Took a little bit longer. I think that’s because it was a brand new caliper and there’s a lot of air trapped up inside the caliper internals, but eventually I got a nice clean bleed out of that and then I came over to the driver’s side and began trying to bleed that one and no matter how long I sat there, no matter how much I did, no matter what I did, I just couldn’t get a no bubble bleed out of that front right or front driver side brake left now.

And I knew it wasn’t the master cylinder because if it were the master cylinder, I’d be having the same problem on the opposite side. So it had to be either the caliper or maybe something else going on in there. And so just to be 100% sure, I decided that I was going to look up the torque specs for, uh, the banjo bolt and check to see, uh, if I was torquing it correctly. Torque specs for banjo bolt are about 12 to 14 foot-pounds. This torque wrench goes from five foot-pounds up to about 80 foot-pounds, so it’s a big range and I think, well, I can get it using that. So I started tightening the banjo bolt down and it felt like this should snap and it wasn’t snapping, so I stopped and I thought, well, what’s a good tough bolt that’s right around that area that I could test this on? So I brought this down to the lowest setting, five foot-pounds, and started testing it on this. Now this bolt is what holds the caliper into the knuckle. You remember if you watched the last episode where I actually had the little spring in the clip that goes underneath the caliper that you pound in? And once that’s pounded in and holding the caliper up, this, uh, threads through that into the knuckle to keep that pin system from moving back and forth. I thought, well, you know, it’s a good strong bolt and it’s going in a knuckle so I can, you know, wrench on it pretty tight and not have to worry about it too bad and I’m certainly not going to wrench more than I’m not going to break it with more than, uh, with five foot-pounds of torque. So, you know, I’ll just put this on five foot-pounds and wait for it to break.

And so I put this on five foot-pounds and I turned it and I turned it and I turned it and, uh, yeah, this thing is a piece of spring because I did that with five foot-pounds. No, I had absolutely no idea how many foot-pounds I was actually applying to this, but it was way more than five. So this thing doesn’t work. Now don’t tell me I don’t know how to use a torque wrench because I’ve got several of this exact kind that are just different sizes. As a matter of fact, I use one to torque the lug nuts down for the wheels and it breaks just fine. So I know what I’m doing. This one is just broken to the point where I sheared off this bolt. Now I know you’re gonna tell me that I’m a dumbass because I should have felt that I was applying way more than five foot-pounds, but you know what? I was like, well, this thing’s gotta break at some point, right? And this is a good tough bolt. I mean, you know, should this thing should break like, you know, the clicker should click way before I ever get to the point of doing any real damage to this thing. No, no. So I sheared the head of this bolt off inside the knuckle and I just, oh, that was a rough day, let me tell you. Luckily this bolt, and I’ll get a video of it so I can put it up here on the screen so you’ll see what I’m talking about, but this bolt actually goes all the way through the knuckle and sticks out the other side. So I was able to get a pair of vice grips on the other side of this and turn it from the opposite direction and back it out so I didn’t have to do any drilling. Uh, thank God I didn’t have to replace the knuckle or do anything weird like that. Let me actually have that get that taken care of, but oh, that was, uh, that was a rough day. So this thing is going in the garbage.

So once I got that taken care of, I still hadn’t figured out why the driver’s side front caliper wouldn’t bleed. I just kept getting bubbles and bubbles and bubbles. Well, it turns out probably because I got a remanufactured caliper, which you almost always do, that the threads, the hole for the bleeder was a little loose and there was really no setting where I could screw in the bleeder far enough to prevent air from leaking in around the threads as I was bleeding, but yet still be far off enough out to actually bleed the line. Now I managed to get there just by having it really tight and just barely getting any fluid out by pumping the brake, but I was able to do that and, uh, verify that there was no more air coming out in the pumps that I was making. So I’m pretty happy with that, but I even wrapped some Teflon tape around the speed bleeder just to try to get it tighter in there so that no brake fluid would leak out around the threads and no air would come in around the threads because, you know, if you got air coming in around the threads of your bleeder while you’re trying to bleed the brakes, then you just have air bubbles going through the line constantly because they’re coming in through that bleeder connection and now they’re not actually in the line. They’re not going from the master cylinder down to the caliper, you know, but they are coming in around that bleeder then going back up out through your hose. Man, I must have went through like, God, 64 ounces or more of brake fluid. Now I kept recycling it because it’s all brand new stuff, but man, that was a pain in the ass. And then once I finally figured out that that’s what it was, it was like hallelujah moment.

Now the agenda for today is to replace that parking brake cable. I got video of where I replaced the master cylinder, so I’ll show you that and bled it on my, uh, my bench. So maybe we’ll take a look at that and once all that is done, then I’m gonna put the wheels back on and take her out for a drive and hope and pray that everything works fine and that the parking brake holds me on a hill because that is the entire reason I did all this stuff in the first place. And I will be damned if I’m not going to solve that one problem for this parking brake cable. The first thing that I’m going to do this time is put some dry lube in there just to help keep things moving along. I’m using dry lube as opposed to like white lithium grease or something else because underneath the vehicle, a lot of grime and grit can get up in there and you want to be dry so it doesn’t attract any more dust and dirt than you have to. Hopefully this will help this slide a little bit better. This cable looks different than the other replacement cable that I had because the other replacement cable had a plastic sheath that went around through this over this steel braided part and this one doesn’t appear to, or if it does, it’s really, really thin, which is fine by me. Either way, I’m just gonna go ahead and lube it up then I make sure this cable moves nice and free.

If you watched the first video in this series, then you know how this goes. Basically just install the cable onto the parking brake mechanism, run the cable down through the front of the cab of the truck underneath, clip it in, run the cable across to the linkage, hook it up, and then, uh, bolt your mechanism in. So I’m not gonna go through that whole thing again on camera. If you want to see how that works, go check out the first video in this series where I take it all apart and put it back together.

I have to admit that I wasn’t originally planning on replacing my master cylinder, but when I did my front calipers, a lot of the brake fluid ran out and the master cylinder actually went dry on me. It could be possible for me to bleed all the brakes even though this cylinder has gone dry. As a matter of fact, I’ve actually already tried to go around and get all four sides bled without having air in the system, but I haven’t had a whole lot of luck. So I’ve decided to take the master cylinder off and bench bleed the master cylinder since I’m going to have it off and go through the entire process of bench bleeding. I’m just going to replace it because I don’t know how old this one is. I don’t know when the last time, uh, it was replaced or, uh, if it’s in good internal working condition. I mean, it seems to be, but you know, I’m very much of the camp that if I’m gonna go through all the trouble of taking it off and bench bleeding it and going through all of that, then I may as well replace it with a new one. Um, this one here is an OE, it’s aftermarket anyway, so I’m not, looks like I’m not replacing an original Ford part or anything. And that way I know when it was last replaced and, uh, should be good to go.

So I’m gonna go ahead and get the fluid out of here as much as possible, disconnect this and, uh, get the new one on the bench and start bleeding. First order of business is getting all the brake fluid out of my old master cylinder and I’ll do that with this metal turkey baster looking thing that I actually picked up from a garage sale and just an old pop bottle and the rest I’ll just let drain out when I disconnect the brake lines. So now the brake lines are disconnected. Now I can disconnect it from the brake booster. So this is a 14 millimeter. It’s pretty tight. There it goes. Um, so there we go, old master cylinder removed. Here’s my new master cylinder. Picked it up from O’Reilly’s, it’s about 40 bucks, not too bad. Um, I think it’s the same as the store brand that you get probably at Advance or AutoZone or any of the other major parts places. It’s just a store brand. It’s basically exactly like what’s coming off the truck. Um, the only disappointing thing is that this said that it came with a bleeder kit and it didn’t. What it came with was a couple of plugs, right? Just like this, nothing to it, just a plug that I guess you could kind of use to bleed it, but I don’t want to do that. I want to actually try to bleed it the right way. So I modified the plug by adding a hose to it. I just drilled a hole through and stuck a hose in there. I had some clear hose or another brake bleeding kit that I had and that’s going to work perfect for me because, uh, just to make sure I don’t cross thread this, right? But I’ll get this in here good and tight. And I also happen to have a couple of, uh, infants. So let’s see, there we go, come on. So, uh, apparently this is good for infants, acetaminophen or brake fluid because this will go right on the end of one of these hoses and I can squirt brake fluid in there up through there to get all the air out. So that’s what we’re gonna do. Brand new container of DOT 3. This, by the way, is called bench bleeding because I’m on a bench. You just want to put this in a vise, get it nice and level and, uh, the reason you want a device is so you can have a lot of pressure pushing in on this cylinder in here and I’m just going to use a brass punch for that when the time comes. But the first thing I’m going to do is try to get all the air out of here by injecting brake fluid into these hoses. Now a lot of these kits come with syringes. Well, the brake bleeder kits come with syringes and they’re going to be a lot bigger than this, so this may take me a little while with this little infant acetaminophen syringe, but we’ll see how it goes. Oh yeah, see the air comes right out of there. I’m just going to keep doing this until no more air comes out. It may be a while this little syringe. Oh, that seemed like there was some fluid right there at the end. Yeah, we have a little fountain going on there now. Okay, so then I think that this side, well, there’s a little bit of air still coming out of there. Let me do one more, oop, and see. I’m actually pushing some air in because when I let the syringe go, some air actually comes back into there. So I’m gonna actually bleed this the opposite direction too by pushing in on my cylinder, but I will do that after I get most of the air out this way. Now that didn’t take nearly as long on that side. Okay, that’s much smaller. Okay, now that I’ve got that mostly done, let me get my, uh, little makeshift clamps here, just enough to hold that on if I can get it. You know, this is much harder on camera. Like when I do this by myself as a test, this stuff just goes right together and as soon as I’m rolling, it’s like, no, no, it’s going to be the most difficult thing you’ve done all day. There we go. Oh, that one worked. All right, so we’re going to top it off. Okay, now I’ll be looking into these hoses for air bubbles as I work the cylinder and you want to be gentle with this because the more you agitate this, the more likely you are to introduce air. Okay, so one of the problems I’m running into is I’m actually sucking air back into the system, so this hose needs to be lower and actually go into the reservoir so they don’t suck air back into the system. There we go. Whoa, that’s what I get for buying cheap dollar store clips. Okay, hopefully that’ll stay. Try this again. Uh, uh, okay, I don’t see any air whatsoever, so I think we’re about ready to try to put this on. There we go. Now for the tricky part. The tricky part is disconnecting these and connecting these back up while leaking as little brake fluid as possible. My flare nut wrench doesn’t seem to be getting any bite on this plastic fitting, so I’m going to just go ahead and use a pair of vice grips for this because I don’t care about this plastic fitting. I can destroy it trying to get it out and that’s fine. I have to make sure it comes out and just getting it loose should be enough. There we go. Let’s be real careful not to cross thread these because that would be a nightmare. Okay, there we go, fully bench bled master cylinder installed. Now it’s time to hit the road once again to see if I fixed the problems from my first go-round. I certainly hope so, but we will see.

Here we are back on the road again. Now you didn’t see any of my original footage for the first time that I did my test drive because it didn’t go so hot. I’m hoping that this time is going to go better. So all I’m doing now, since my brakes are already bedded, I don’t have to worry too much about getting up to a high speed and then slamming on the brakes to transfer the pad material onto my rotors or the, uh, shoe material onto my drums. All I’m testing this time is to make sure that the brakes feel good, they’re not spongy, and that they stop me appropriately and that I don’t veer side to side when I hit the brakes. Come up to a stop sign here and we’re going to see how this goes. Hopefully I don’t veer one side or the other and no, no veering side to side. So, uh, we’re actually at the stop sign now and that seemed to work pretty good. So what that tells me is that I’ve solved that issue where I veer side to side and almost certainly the problem there was that my brakes weren’t properly bled and I’ll talk a little bit more about that at the conclusion of the video.

Let’s do one more here. I got another stop sign coming up. Hopefully the fuzz isn’t anywhere around here because I’m going a little bit fast, but we are out in the county, so should be all right. And no, feels good. And now the time has come for my other true test: parking the truck on a hill and seeing if the parking brake holds me. Now I’ve got a specific hill in town that I use for this test because it’s actually in a parking lot and doesn’t have a whole lot of traffic. So let’s see how we do. All right, I’m facing down the hill and I’m not moving, which has never been a problem. It’s always been a problem facing up the hill. So let’s see how that goes. And up we go, parking brake applied and foot off the brake. And as you can see, the trees in the background aren’t moving and that’s because I’m not moving and the truck isn’t moving either, which is fantastic. I’m very happy to report that this second go round has been an unqualified success. My braking performance has been fantastic. I don’t veer either left or right when braking hard and maybe the most important thing as far as I’m concerned is that my parking brake is fixed. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I can now hold my truck on a hill both forwards and backwards. Oh man, that feels good. 85 F-150 Bullnose brake job special in the can finally. Man, that took me longer than I expected. It was like a month that my truck was laid up in this garage. Now that’s because I have a full-time job and a couple of babies in the house, so I don’t have as much time to devote to the truck as, you know, I’d probably like. But that’s okay, we get things done at our own pace.

As I go through this stuff, this is lessons learned right here. If you hear me repeat something I’ve already said, that’s because I’m an old guy and that happens to me and you’re just going to have to deal with it. Okay, so like I said, a 85 F-150 brake job special lessons learned. Go when you’re braking a vehicle and it’s drifting to one side or the other, hopefully and probably that’s because you didn’t bleed the brakes completely. At least that’s what you hope it is because if it’s not, then that means that it’s probably either a bad caliper or it could even be bad steering components in there somewhere. Although I wasn’t terribly worried about the steering component thing simply because I wasn’t having that problem before I took the truck out for a drive or changed any of the brakes. So I was pretty confident that it was either the caliper or it was the brake fluid and I was hoping it was the brake fluid and it turns out that it was because I got the truck finally bled correctly and that problem went away. So that is fantastic. I don’t have to replace my calipers again.

So, and we’ll talk a little bit about brake bleeding because that was a whole experience in and of itself that I didn’t expect, but we’ll get there. So the parking brake cable, I was very surprised that the Wagner cable broke as easily as it did and didn’t seem to work very well even when it wasn’t broke and maybe it was defective from the beginning. I don’t know, um, but I will tell you that the Brake Best, aka I think Dorman cable is way better. Man, that truck feels so good when you put the parking brake on now and you know, park down a hill. When I put the parking brake on and ratchet that thing down, it feels so solid. It has never felt like that since I’ve owned the truck, so that is fantastic. Definitely recommend that brand, Brake Best. I’ll put a link in the description to where I got that cable. Um, yeah, definitely, definitely a much better cable than the Wagner cable. Sorry, Wagner, you know, I got nothing against you, but that cable was just terrible.

So, uh, back to the, uh, the bolt that snapped, right? And the little torque wrench debacle that we had. Look, I know that you probably think I’m a dumbass and I probably am a dumbass, but not because of the torque wrench. The, well, okay, partly because of the torque wrench, but not because I don’t know how to use a torque wrench. Okay, so I know how to use a torque wrench. Uh, my problem was that I tested the torque wrench on a bolt that was installed on the truck and I should not have done that. What I should have done was tested the torque wrench on a bolt that was mounted somewhere in my garage, either maybe on the vise or maybe, you know, welded to a piece of metal or something that I knew if it busted, oh well. And, uh, something that I could really, really wrench in like a hundred foot-pounds or more on and not have to worry about it breaking. Um, testing that on the truck was stupid because obviously if the torque wrench is broken, which this one was, you run the risk of snapping a bolt, which I did. And, uh, you know, but you know, to be fair to myself, I didn’t expect that torque wrench to be broken that badly. It was brand new. I had just taken it out of the package. So, uh, that said, if you guys have the recommendations for a good torque wrench, let me know. I’m definitely in the market for it. I was never going to use the Harbor Freight torque wrenches to build my engine. I know better than that. I’m going to use a better name brand, but, and I was going to wait until I was building the engine to get that. But now maybe, uh, you know, that I’ve thrown that torque wrench away, I probably ought to go ahead and replace it with something much better. So, uh, I don’t know that I have the cash for a digital version. I don’t even know if a digital version is necessarily better than a click stop version, but, uh, you know, debate that, that would be great, uh, to find out you guys’ thoughts on that.

Now on to the bleeding, which turned out to be a way bigger pain than I ever expected it to. And I think the reason is because I let the master cylinder run dry. Uh, the master cylinder ran dry because I took the brake lines off the calipers in the front of the truck and just sort of let them leak into a bucket, which, you know, ran the master cylinder dry. And then of course I cleaned it out thinking that, uh, you know, it needs to be cleaned, so we’ll clean it out and fill it with new brake fluid. But the problem is that when you do that, air gets into the nooks and crannies of the master cylinder and really it’s, it’s possible to bleed that entire system from scratch on the vehicle, but really you need to take the master cylinder off and bench bleed it because that is so much easier and the master cylinder is not hard to remove. So that’s definitely a good idea to do that. And of course, since I was taking it off anyway, I figured I may as well replace the whole master cylinder, which I did. And once that was done and bench bled and reinstalled in the vehicle, those rear brakes bled right away, like within five pumps all the air came out and they were good to go. So that was a very good validation that I was on the right path to take care of this bleeding problem. The front right bled fairly quickly. It took a little bit longer, maybe 25, 30 pumps for that, but I’m guessing that’s probably because of the calipers brand new. There’s some nooks and crannies in there and, uh, you got to get all of the air out. And then of course, the driver’s side front is a whole other story altogether.

One thing to note about bleeding brakes, which was very frustrating, is that you’ve got to get all the air out. I kept getting all these little micro bubbles like the, you know, the carbonation in a Coke bottle or something. Uh, that’s the kind of size bubbles we’re talking about and they just kept coming out no matter what I did. It was very, very frustrating, but you got to get those out because if you don’t, over time, they could coalesce into a much larger bubble which can get in there and cause sponginess and responsiveness issues. You just don’t want that. So try to get, well, not try and get all the air out of your brake lines. Uh, that’s important.

Now the issue that I was having with the front left is that I knew I had to get all the air out and I just kept getting air in the lines every single time I would pump the brake and it began to get really, really old. And of course the reason for that is because I was having air come in around my bleeder screw and no matter how many times I pump the brake, the air would always come in around the bleeder screw and then go back up to the lines and it looked like I never had the brakes properly bled. To solve that, I put Teflon tape around the bleeder. Once I found out that was the issue, that took a couple of days to track that stupid thing down, but once I figured that’s, uh, what the problem was, I put some Teflon tape around it and got it fairly tight in there, but at the point where I could still bleed it, but it was, you know, tight enough that it wasn’t going to leak around the threads and that took care of it. I was able to actually bleed it to the point where it wasn’t leaking anymore. A lot of guys say that you can use grease. If you put grease around the threads of the bleeder’s screw, it’ll prevent air from going in that way. I tried that, it didn’t work for me and it may just because I didn’t use enough grease. I was kind of afraid to get too much grease in there and maybe I don’t want it getting inside and causing some issues inside where the actual brake fluid would flow and that kind of stuff. Teflon tape worked for me. It could work for you to give it a try if that’s your issue. Remember that could be an issue if you keep pumping your brakes and you get nothing but air, check those bleeder screws because man, it took me a couple of days to figure that out and it was like, oh, when I finally figured that’s what it was, ah, that was a huge relief off my mind and I got that thing bled. As you saw, took it off for a test drive, performed flawlessly. It breaks like a dream. It breaks now better than it ever has. Obviously, it, uh, the parking brake works better than it ever has, uh, feels solid, feels good. I’m so happy. It’s nice to have brand new fresh brake system. I know when it was installed, I know how it was installed and I can schedule my future maintenance, uh, based on these, these dates that I know that known good components were put in, you know, that’s important. And I also learned a ton along the way. If I ever have to service my brake system again, I’ll, uh, have a reference other than just the internet and YouTube to pull from. So definitely a frustrating long, but overall good experience because we’re back on the road and better than ever and that’s the way you always want to be at the end of the day. So if you have any questions, comments, concerns, growers, internet ramblings, stick them below. Always thanks again for watching, guys. We will see you next time.