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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.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage for part three of the Bullnose brake job special. Today, hopefully, we’ll be wrapping up with the front brakes. So, I’ve got new hubs, new rotors—actually, it’s one piece hub and rotor—new calipers, new pads, new wheel bearings, the whole nine yards up here. Should be fun getting dirty, packing these bearings, and getting everything back together. So stay tuned.

Just like in the back of the truck, the first thing we’ve got to do is some disassembly. We’re going to start with the brake caliper since that’s the first piece that has to come off to replace anything here. Now, normally when you take off a brake caliper, you would just remove it and then hang it somewhere so the brake line doesn’t get kinked up. A lot of guys use bungee cords or, you know, wire hangers or something like that. But since I’m gonna actually be replacing the entire caliper, I’ve got to remove the brake line completely. So that’s where we’re going to start. This is a 9/16.

Something to note about disconnecting a caliper from a brake line versus a wheel or brake cylinder from a brake line is that there’s not an easy way to cap this connection. The way this works is that this bolt goes through here, actually goes that way, and there’s a hole in the bolt for the brake line or the brake fluid to go through, and then it comes out the end. So when you remove this, that connection inside of here is just open, and there’s not really a good way to plug it. Now, maybe they make something to do that, I don’t know. I’m not familiar with anything, so I just have a bucket here for all the brake fluid to drip into.

On these Bullnose trucks, the calipers are mounted in a sort of unique way, and I’m not sure what all vehicles this mounting system is used on. It’s the first time actually that I’ve ever seen something like this. But there’s this little assembly down here with actually like a little spring in here that pushes the caliper up into this plate, and there’s a plate up top here, like a groove that the caliper slides into. And so this assembly here actually has a spring that holds it in place with tension. So you have to remove this bolt and then pound out this assembly, and I’m just going to use a regular pin punch for that. Just like with the brake line, this is a 9/16.

And there’s the assembly with the spring. There’s not too much to it, and actually with the calipers that I purchased, I got a new set of these, so I actually don’t need to keep these, so they’re going to go in the garbage. And now the caliper should just come off, rotate out, lift up, and slide off just like that. There’s some brake fluid still in there, and of course the pads slide right out of the caliper. You can toss those. This pad here is actually stuck to the back of the rotor here assembly. There we go, that pad comes out.

Now, these calipers can actually be sent back for a core charge. Usually, when you buy a brand new caliper, you’re usually charged a core charge anywhere from five dollars to maybe fifteen depending on where you buy them. And then if you want that core charge back, you send your old caliper to whoever you purchased your new caliper from. I bought my new calipers from Rock Auto, and the core charge is only like five dollars, so I’m not even sure it’s worth the money to send these back. I’m probably just going to go ahead and pitch them.

Now that the caliper is off, the next job is to remove the rotor and hub assembly, and to do that, I’ve got to get this cap here off the front. There’s a couple of different ways to do this. I’m going to show you what I think is the right way to do it, which is just putting a little screwdriver in here and peeling it off little by little. These caps aren’t terribly expensive, but if you do this right, you can reuse the cap. Now, I bought new ones because my cap on the other side is mangled because whoever did that side didn’t take it off like this. So if I clean this up just a little bit, it’ll be much easier for you to see the bits and pieces inside of here, just a little.

So we’ve got this cotter pin here, which holds on the castle nut here, and then behind that, you’ve got the actual spindle nut itself. So first order of business is to take off the cotter pin. Success! Castle nut, and there’s your actual spindle nut. Now, these actually aren’t typically very tight. As a matter of fact, this one here was just finger tight, just barely. And so there’s a torque spec for these, but it’s really low. It’s like ten foot pounds or something like that. So most of the time, when you’re reading manuals or something, that’ll tell you to snug it up, give it like a quarter turn, rotate everything to make sure everything’s seated, and then turn it back so that you’re not too tight. But we’ll go through that when I do the installation for the new hub.

Now this is all cleaned up and taken apart. This should just come right off. Let’s get our old bearing and washer out of there, and off it comes. So this is the hub and rotor that came out. On the back, you’ve got the rear bearing seal, and since I’m not going to save this seal, I’ve got a new one. I just want to pop this off, and as a matter of fact, to be honest, I’m not going to save this hub and rotor assembly either, so I don’t really care what I do to it. I can get away with this because I don’t care about these bearings. And there we go, our bearing and seal.

So in terms of old parts, we’ve got the old rotor and hub assembly, the old seal, the old inner bearing, and the old outer bearing. But these are all being replaced, so in the garbage they go. Obviously, this is my new hub and rotor assembly. I’ve got it turned upside down so the part that faces the truck is up, and these are my new bearings. Actually, I’ve got, of course, you have two. You have an inner bearing and an outer bearing, and then a new bearing seal. Let me show you this real quick because these rotors are a little bit different than I expected because they come with races already installed. So here’s my Timken bearing, and you can see there’s the actual bearing itself, and then there’s the race that comes with the bearing. But if you look, there’s already a race preset into this hub assembly. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to put this bearing down in here and just verify that it seats in there correctly and I don’t have any issues with it. And it seems to seat and fit very well. So because of that, I’m just going to go ahead and use the race that’s already inside of the hub.

Now, I’ve done a lot of research since I found out that these hubs came with their own races, and I couldn’t find anything definitive that said whether or not I should try to remove these races or if I should just go ahead and use them as they are. Because the argument would be that, well, the Timken race is going to be better quality than that race or that the Timken race and bearing are a matched set and that the bearing won’t work as well on this race as it would work on the Timken race. So here’s my line of thinking: getting these races out of these hubs can be a bit of a chore. You have to have either special tools or know how to weld. If you weld a bead around the outside of the race, when it cools, the race can contract and will sometimes pop off. Trying to beat these out with a screwdriver or a punch or something can be a real pain. You risk damaging the hub itself, maybe mushrooming out the ends and causing some issues. I mean, these things need to be pretty clean and straight or else you’ll get some problems with your wheels, obviously. So I don’t know that I want to chance doing that. I’ve never done that before.

As much as I would love to use the Timken races, I think it’s just going to be too much trouble and potential disaster for me to try to get these races out of these hubs. They’re in there pretty tight. Just to do a test, I took a—let me get it—just to do a test, I took a brass punch and tried to see if I could punch out the outer race of this rotor right here. And you can see that the end of this, if I can get it to focus here, I don’t know if I can. There it goes. Yeah, so you can see that the end of this is pretty well hosed. I mean, it’s brass, so it’s meant to be that way, but that’s what I got trying to pound that race out of this rotor hub assembly. So since I didn’t have any luck trying to get it out, I figure it’s going to be way too much trouble trying to get all four races out of both hub and rotor assemblies, and I’ll just go ahead and use the Timken bearings with the races that came with the rotors.

And here’s the other thing too: if these races came with these rotors and these aren’t necessarily the best rotors out there, they’re Raybestos, which is sort of middle of the line. But if they come like this and they’re installed like this on, you know, thousands and thousands of vehicles all over the country, then you gotta think that these races are probably serviceable. And I’m not gonna be racing my truck or doing anything crazy. If I were, then these would probably be drilled and slotted. As a matter of fact, I’d probably convert this whole thing to be two pieces—the hub and rotor assembly would be separate because you can do that. And then that way, you can go out and get a little bit nicer rotors, drilled, slotted performance rotors. And then I’d probably be upgrading the calipers to double pistons and all this crazy stuff if I were going to be racing the truck, but I’m not.

So if I were worried about all that stuff, then I’d probably go ahead and maybe pound these out. But that’s kind of a moot point because if I were doing all of that, I would make sure to get hubs without races already installed. These hubs are brand new and should be pretty clean, but just to be 100%, I’m gonna hit them with some brake cleaner and a clean rag. The important part is inside these bearing races where the bearings are going to go, just to make sure that there’s nothing in there. This should be a fun experience for me. I’ve never packed bearings before in my life, but that’s the next step. If I want to put this rotor and hub assembly onto my spindle, then I’ve got to pack these bearings with grease.

Now, I’m going to use a bearing packer because, like I said, I’ve never done this before, and I want to make sure that I get the job done right. You can pack bearings using your hands, probably with gloves, by rolling the bearings across your palm and getting all the grease inside of there. But like I said, I’ve never done that before. I am absolutely not an expert, so if I can get a tool that will help me ensure that I’m doing it correctly, that’s what I’m gonna do. So this is actually pretty easy to use. Obviously, it’s never been used before, but take a little plunger out, screw the cone off. You put your bearing in there with, obviously, the taper going in like that. Once you got the bearing in there, screw this back on tight, put all your grease down on the bottom of there, put that in, and push down. And as you compress this, the grease goes up in through those holes right there, out through the holes in there, and goes into all the little nooks and crannies of the bearing, at least in theory. We’ll see how well it really works.

I’m using red and tacky grease for this. All the reviews for this grease are very favorable. It’s got all the right ratings, GCLB and LGI number two. It’s got a really high drop point. Project Farm actually did a video using red and tacky grease. That’s really interesting. So if you haven’t seen Project Farm’s videos, you should go check them out. He’s a really cool dude. So we’re just about ready to get rolling on this. Obviously, the first bearing that I’m going to do my packing on is the inner bearing. That’s the bigger one. And then once the inner bearing is packed and good and gooey, then I can take my bearing seal and pop it on here and then pack my outer bearing, flip this thing around, stick it on the spindle, and get everything put back together.

So there we go. Now that looks to be pretty well packed. All right, now it’s off to the races. Okay, now just a little more right here on top just to make sure it’s good and gooey. I’m not going to have any issues here, and now we can put our seal on. And I’m just gonna make sure that it’s good and even here, and I’m just gonna bang it on with a rubber mallet because I’ve never done this before. I want to make sure to use something like a rubber mallet instead of an actual hammer. It gives me a little more leeway in terms of making mistakes.

All right, so the rear bearing is installed, or the inner bearing I suppose I should say. And now we’ll pack the outer bearing just like that. So I’m just going to take a little bit of grease and put it on the spindle just to make sure that there’s plenty of lubrication here. Now take the hub and rotor assembly that’s already got the rear seal and rear bearing, or inner bearing on it, get it on, and we’ll take my packed outer bearing and get it on. Then we’ll take the spindle washer. Now this is actually the spindle washer that came off the truck. It’s been used, but these don’t really go bad, so you can reuse them. The one that I got with my Dorman kit actually is the wrong one, so I’m gonna reuse the one that goes on the truck.

All right, and now our brand new spindle nut. And you get this on there about as tight as you can by hand, and then you rotate your bearing to make sure it’s seated. And so you can turn this a little more. You want to make sure you don’t get these too tight because if you get them too tight, they’ll put a lot of pressure on your bearings, and they’ll wear out. So as you rotate it around, you notice I can tighten it up even more, right? So I’m going to keep doing this until I can’t hand tighten this anymore, which is right about there. And then I’m going to back off just a little.

The last two parts that I need are my new castle nut and my new cotter pin. So the castle nut just goes over top of this like that, and what you want to do is try to find where this is the right tightness. This nut is the correct tightness so that it doesn’t bind your bearings, but it’s not so loose that it really kind of comes off easy. Yeah, right about there. And find where it lines up good with one of the slots in the castle nut, and then you just drop in your cotter pin and bend it up. There we go.

Okay, now that I’ve got this all assembled, I’m going to load it up a little bit more grease, and I’ll put my cap on. That just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It might take a little bit of persuading with a rubber mallet. There’s always a bigger hammer.

Okay, so I may have gotten just a little overzealous on the dust cap here. So just to make sure that I wasn’t gonna hurt anything, I went ahead and took it off, which I’ll do now real quick just to check to see if this indentation is going to be too deep. And it turns out that it is. Now, of course, besides the beautiful little China label there, you can see where my cotter pin has been digging into the top of the cap, which means that my dent here is just a little too deep. So this cap is garbage, but that’s okay because I have found a pretty neat trick to get my next cap on here without damaging it.

Now, of course, I bought two, one for each side. I’m gonna use my second cap for this side tonight, and then I’ll pick up another cap at the parts store tomorrow so I can do the other side. So let me show you what I’ve come up with. Here’s my other cap, also made in China, of course. And this is a two-inch piece of PVC, and it just so happens that that cap fits right in there, right along the ridge here. So I’m going to use this piece of PVC to pound this cap in. You get it started first, try to get it centered as much as possible anyway. Feels all right. I will use my PVC and see if I can get it on. Beautiful! Simple trick. It’s the best kind.

Now that the hub and rotor are back on, I’m going to give it one final cleaning before I put the caliper and pads on just to make sure there’s nothing on the braking surface that’s going to trip me up later. Here’s something interesting: these are my brand new brake pads, and they came with this hardware right here, which mounts the caliper to the knuckle. It’s that spring that I removed earlier, and this came with the caliper, so actually I have two sets of this little compression spring, and I don’t need both sets. So because I like the color black, we’re going to use the ones that came with the pads.

The brake shoe kit that I got came with this little clip. Oops! This little clip here, and of course, this is the inner shoe here. So the inner shoe slides into these notches just like that, and the clip is what holds it in. So we turn the clip like this, pop it onto the shoe, and then wedge it in there just like that, and then the caliper goes over top of this. Now that the inner pad is already mounted up, it’s time to put on our caliper. Before we put the caliper in though, we want to make sure we put some brake caliper grease on all the metal parts that are going to be touching each other. So where this pad touches the piston on the caliper, and then where this pad here actually touches the caliper on the other side, you want to make sure that you put some brake caliper grease on that to keep things moving smoothly, keep things quiet.

You also just want to make sure when you’re doing this that you don’t get any brake caliper grease on the actual pads or on the rotor surface itself because that will hurt your braking performance. So I’m going to be greasing the caliper rather than the pads because it’s just easier that way. So we’re just going to put a little bit of grease right around the piston. You don’t need a whole lot, just enough to get it coated. And then this obviously goes this way, but then this mounts on there just like that. So all the places where this contacts, especially in these little grooves and things, I want to make sure I get some grease. All right, there we go. Now I can put my pad on, being careful not to get any grease on the surface of the pad. There we go. And now I should be able to mount my caliper, start from the top here.

So there we go. Sometimes it takes a little bit of persuasion. So now I should be able to put in my holding pin and spring down here in the bottom. You just get it until it lines up with this hole for the bolt, and now we’re ready to put in the bolt. This bolt came with the caliper. It’s already got some thread locker on it. If yours doesn’t, it’s probably a good idea. Here we go, one mounted caliper with brand new brake pads. And now to put on the brake line. Now when you get a new caliper, it should come with a couple of crush washers like these. You want to make sure that you put a crush washer on either side of this block. So I want to put one on this banjo bolt, put one on this banjo bolt here, put it through, and then another. And now we can mount it.

And there we go, one front brake assembly completely replaced. I said before that I feel like there’s a right way and a wrong way to take these caps off. I mean, obviously, there’s a right way or wrong way to put them back on, right? But anyway, so this cap has been taken off what I believe to do the wrong way. If you look, let me get a little bit closer. So there you can see the damage that’s been done to this cap, right? Which allows dust and even maybe liquids and stuff to get inside this little gap there. So you don’t want that. And here is how that happens. Since I’m going to replace this cap anyway, I don’t mind doing it this way to show you what I’m talking about. Taking it off with a pair of channel locks, it works. It absolutely does, but it causes all kinds of damage, and it’s just as easy to use a screwdriver and do it right.

Unlike the other side of the truck, the spindle nut on this side is a little tighter than finger tight, so I’m going to use this 27 millimeter socket to get it off. And that was all it took, just a little bit. These don’t go on very tight. Get the washer and the outer bearing out. Now I’m going to reuse this washer. There’s an interesting thing going on. The replacement kit that I got for this nut, washer, and cotter pin actually has a washer that is different than this one. As a matter of fact, not even the same diameter. Now it looks like it might be able to fit, but when you try to put it on, focus, it’s a little bit tight. Actually, on this side, it’s not too bad. On the other side, it was pretty tight. So since these original washers don’t really get a whole lot of wear on them and they don’t really wear out, I’m just reusing the originals.

So, so, so foreign. Well, that didn’t go as planned. So that means we’re having a part four where I talk about lessons learned and reinstall this brake cable again because this one busted. Talk about this lovely bolt that I sheared off because of this piece of Harbor Freight torque wrench and how I had to replace the master cylinder and the nightmare that I had trying to bleed these brakes. So stay tuned for that. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we will see you next time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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