Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Obviously, the brakes are one of the most important systems in your vehicle’s operation, which is why over the course of the next few videos, I’ll be doing a complete brake job on my ’85 F-150 using all the parts that you see here. If you’d like to watch me do that and learn how to change all the brakes and the front hubs and rotors and bearings, pads, shoes, the works on an ’85 F-150 or a Bullnose in general, stick around.
So you may be wondering why I’m bothering with replacing basically everything except for the brake lines and the master cylinder and the brake booster. Well, when I was at the tire store, I had to park on an incline, and so I put the parking brake on and took my foot off the regular brake, and the truck began to roll backwards even with the parking brake fully engaged. Now, obviously, that’s a problem. So I came home and began to try to diagnose it, and no matter what adjustments I made, I just couldn’t get the rear wheels to not roll backwards with the parking brake engaged. And so I figured maybe it was time to go through the system and see if I can’t get that figured out. I figured while I was doing that, I may as well replace everything because at least with everything replaced, I’m starting fresh. I know when the last time all this stuff was replaced because I replaced it myself all at the same time, say about the truck used. So there’s no way for me to know when the last time the brakes were serviced or the hubs and rotors were serviced or when the bearings were changed. So by doing all this myself right now, I know I’m starting from a good place.
In addition to that, brake components really aren’t that expensive individually. Now, when you go out and you buy them all at the same time like this, it can get pretty pricey, but generally, they’re not that bad individually. And this also gives me an opportunity to go through and clean things up, paint a few things so that they’ll last a little bit longer and look a little bit nicer. And hopefully, after all that’s said and done, I will have fixed my parking brake problem. And if I don’t fix my parking brake problem, then at least I know it’s not the parts; it’s just me being an idiot.
The first thing that I’m going to do is actually apply the parking brake and just do some testing. Normally, you would do this with a wheel on, but I’ve already got the wheels off, so I’ll do it this way. Now the parking brake is applied, so I shouldn’t be able to turn this at all, and by hand, I can’t. But if I put just a little bit of pressure on it, I can spin it backwards. Now I can’t do it forwards at all, so what that tells me is that if this truck were parked on a hill, it’d be able to roll backwards, and that’s a problem.
I’m also going to check the operation of the regular brakes. Now, I’m a one-man show, so I don’t have anyone to check the wheels for me while I press the brake or vice versa. So what I did was I built this little wedge out of a 2×4 and an old t-shirt and just a sponge right here, and that way I can wedge this end up against the brake and put this end up against the seat and not have to worry about ripping my seat. And that way, the brake will stay down while I can go around and check all the wheels. So just like with the parking brake, I can’t really turn this even if I apply pressure. I really can’t turn it, so that’s good, except that I can turn it a little bit backwards. So at least it’s consistent. This still needs to be changed.
Here we are in the front, and the calipers are fully engaged, and there is no way that I can turn this. I’m not even going to put a breaker bar on it because I know it won’t turn. I tried this earlier with the tires on, and I couldn’t turn even using the entire tire to try to turn it. So the front brakes on this vehicle are pretty good, but I’m still going to go ahead and replace them since I’m doing everything else anyway.
When you’re checking your brakes, there are several things that you need to be on the lookout for. One of those things is ridges in your rotors. Now, this vehicle has rotors in front and drums in the back, and you just run your thumb or finger along here, and you know, man, I really can, I can feel some ridges in there. So even though I said that these brakes are good because they don’t turn, it’s probably a good idea to replace these rotors anyway. Now, you can sometimes take these off and have them turned. I’m just going to replace them. The rotors and hubs that I bought aren’t that expensive, so it’s worth it for me just to replace the whole thing.
Another thing you’re going to want to look out for is just how much meat you have left on your brake pads. And to check that, I really recommend you go out and get one of these little digital calipers. They’re pretty cheap from Harbor Freight. This one works fantastic, and it just allows you to really sort of measure exactly how much meat there is left on your pads and on your shoes. So let’s take a look. I’m going to say this right around nine millimeters right there. Again, that’s just kind of an eyeball. So for front brake pads, you really want to have at the very minimum three and a half millimeters. Really, I recommend having more than 6.5 millimeters, and I’ve got nine, so I’ve got plenty of pad on there, and I really don’t need to replace them. But again, since pads are pretty cheap and I’m doing everything else anyway, I’m just gonna go ahead and put brand new pads on.
While you’re checking out your brake system, you’re also going to want to verify proper operation of your calipers and of your drum brake hardware. But if you’re alone like I am, it’s going to be really hard to push the brake pedal and watch the caliper work or watch the drum brake hardware work. So I’ve got a trick for you that should help you out. I apologize for any shaky cam issues. Normally, I would have a tripod, but I am using my tripod for something else. So what I’ve got here is I’ve got a pad on top of my tripod pointing at my caliper, which is in camera mode, and I actually have an app for this pad which broadcasts whatever’s on the screen to my computer, which shows up on my television. Now, you could use your phone or another pad instead of a TV and computer like this. All you’ve got to do is point it to the right IP address, and whatever is being broadcasted will show up on your device. And now I can come over here, watch my TV screen, press down on my brake pedal, and watch my caliper engage. Now I can do the same thing for my rear brake hardware. Oh, look at that. Now keep in mind there’s going to be a delay between what you do and what you see just because of the latency of the connection, but at least this way you can see things actually happen as you do them. And now for the passenger side, this lets me see the parking brake operation as well.
You want to check your brake shoes and your brake drum in the back just like you check your rotor and your pad to the front. So just like the rotor, you can run your finger or thumb inside this part of the drum here where the shoes touch and see if there are any ridges. There’s a couple, a little bit of ridging right there, but it’s not too bad. This drum is actually in pretty good shape. As far as these shoes go, you can check the thickness of the shoe the same way that you check the thickness of the pad to the front with a little digital caliper. Looks like I’m at right about five millimeters or so. Now for brake shoes, you want to be greater than three and definitely greater than one and a half. One and a half is probably the minimum. Some guys will tell you that as long as you’re not running into the rivets, if these are riveted, then you’re okay. But really, I would say anything less than three is probably about time to change them. They’re not hard to change; they’re not expensive. So I would definitely do it if they’re less than three. These are right about five, but just like the front, since I’m going through and changing everything, since these are pretty cheap, I might as well go ahead and change them as well.
I’m going to actually start my work on the parking brake. So the first thing I’m going to do is get under the truck, and you can see right there is all the parking brake linkages. The driver side parking brake has already been replaced with this cable. I did that about a year ago because I was having problems back then too, and so I decided to just go ahead and replace the other two cables as well, the front cable there and the cable to the passenger side. And since I’m doing all this cable replacement, I’m just going to go ahead and take this entire assembly apart so I can take it off and put some rust remover on there and try to get this stuff as cleaned up as I can. So now we’ll just get to taking this thing apart. Remove the spring. I’m not sure I got enough slack to actually do this. No, I don’t. So I gotta turn this nut here. So this is just a 5/16. It’s a little rusty, but it’s not too bad in my case, so it’s going to come off pretty easy. I’m going to take this entire bracket off so that I can get some rust remover on it and just kind of clean it up. Let’s see if I got enough slack now. Got enough slack for that one, and enough slack for that one. So there we go. Like I said before, this one here is basically brand new, so I got no need to replace this one. Yeah, it moves just fine. But this one here, yeah, I can move it, but it’s pretty tight, so we’re going to replace it. It’s just got this clip that goes on the end here. Now I should be able to pop this off with a screwdriver.
All right, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to give myself some slack. This bracket here is closer to the rear wheel. It’s what hangs the parking brake cables up to the frame, and this here is pretty tight, so I’m going to go ahead and take this bracket off so I can get a little bit more slack to get this off of the bracket off of the hanger up front, and I’m using a half-inch ratchet for this. There we go. It’s not too bad, but a little bit rusty, so I’ll probably go ahead and put some rust remover on this piece here too. Okay, now that I’ve got some slack here, let’s see if I can get this thing off of here. You need to bend these tabs in so you can pull it on out. Easy peasy. Now this piece here is loose. I can go ahead and disconnect it and get some rust remover on there and try to get it cleaned up. I’m not sure what this piece is called, but I know I’ve looked it up, but it’s pretty expensive, so it’s going to definitely be better to clean this up and reuse it than to try to find a replacement.
If we look inside the truck, you can see where the parking brake assembly is right here. I’ve already got it unhooked, so it’s really easy to move. I’m not going to worry about that, but this is the cable here that you’ve got to replace, and it hooks in right back behind, oops, right back behind this plate right here. There’s another one of those clips. Now that’s real hard to get to. Now I could spend a bunch of time fiddle farting around trying to get that out of there, but I think what I’d rather do is just remove this entire assembly because that way I can actually get to it and get the assembly out and maybe even clean it up a little bit, lube it, and make sure that it’s good. The problem is, I don’t know if you can see it or not, it’s way back in there, but the bolts that hold this in right there, the nut is actually on the other side. So I’ve got two of those. You can’t see the other one from where I’m at. Two of those to get out. You can kind of see it there. And plus this right here to take out, I think to take this entire assembly out. Now, in order to get to those, I have to do something about this shroud right here. And so I’ve already taken some of the screws out. That’s what I got down there, and I’m going to go ahead and finish to see if I can get this shroud out of the way so I can get to those bolts. These, by the way, are 5.5 millimeter. They’re pretty small, small heads anyway.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that right there is what I’m trying to get to, and I think I got enough room to get my hand up in there with a ratchet and take care of that. So it turns out that I’m actually an idiot, and both of these bolts are available to be ratcheted on from inside the hood, but you can’t really see it. It’s kind of dark, but yeah, there you go. So I actually didn’t have to take that shroud off at all, but live and learn. Look upon this bolt, ye mighty, and despair, for it is a 10 millimeter. Damn, is your nut back there? There it is. That’ll be fun. Well, I don’t know where it went. That’s what I get for mocking it, I suppose. There it is. Come here, you.
Okay, now this should pretty much just come out, I think. And make sure you disconnect any electrical connections. This is a pretty old truck, so just got the one right there. In my haste to remove the parking brake, I almost forgot that there is yet another clip down here, so I gotta get that out. There we go. Now I should be able to take it out from inside the cab. Okay, now let’s see if I can get this thing out of here. There it comes. So success! I don’t know if taking this entire assembly out of the truck just to get to this clip is easier than trying to get this clip off with this still installed in the truck or not, but I do know that taking this entire thing out gives me the opportunity to clean it up, to lube it up, and it also gives me the experience of taking it out of the truck. And every little thing that I can do to learn more about this truck by experience, yeah, I’ll go ahead and take that opportunity. So out it comes. Man, that is a whole lot easier to do it inside the truck, though, that’s for sure.
Okay, so there’s just a little that this goes in right inside here, so you just have to kind of manhandle it out of there. Wow, so I just learned something. If the parking brake is in the engaged position, taking this thing out is almost impossible because now I can’t get it out of there. It’s tucked underneath this bracket, but if I disengage the parking brake mechanism, oh, well, gee, easy peasy. Oh, and I’m spent.
I’ve got my station here all set up to clean and de-rust some of these parts if I can, and I’m going to start out by just kind of cleaning things off with some brake cleaner just to get started. The rust remover that I’m using is Rust-Oleum rust dissolver gel. I’ve never used it before; I have no idea how well it’ll work, but we’re going to give it a try. Now, the instructions say to get the parts wet and make sure they stay wet throughout the process, so I got a little bucket of water, and we’re going to follow the directions.
All right, so those guys are all soaked up. Now for the mechanism, I’m just going to go ahead and wet my rag and kind of dab it on here. Okay, now we let that sit for a little while and see how it works. So I sprayed the other side of my mechanism as well, and what I’ve discovered is that if you don’t mind putting in a little bit of extra elbow grease, this rust remover works pretty well. There you go, not too shabby. Here we are, rinsed off, dried off, and pretty much ready to put back in. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty impressed considering how rough it was before. Let’s see if I can get it to focus. Yeah, that’s not too bad.
So this piece right here is by far the worst piece under there. This is after one application of the rust remover. I think I’m gonna do one more, see if I can’t get the rest of this off of here, and then what I’ll probably do is paint this piece just to prevent it from rusting so much in the future. So to be honest, this was the piece that I was really concerned about in terms of rust, and here’s what I was going for: being able to just roll that nut on and off of this bolt without having to use a wrench and dealing with all that rust. Beautiful!
I’m also planning on painting my brake drums and calipers with just a high heat black spray paint, again just to keep the rust off and help them last a little bit longer. Before I do that, though, I’m going to hit them with some brake clean. They’re pretty clean, but they may still have some oil and gunk from the factory, so I just want to make sure they’re good and clean so that the paint would adhere. So obviously, before you paint brake parts, you have to make sure that you tape some areas off. So on the caliper, I want to make sure that I tape off around the piston. I don’t want to hit this boot, certainly. And then with the drums, obviously, you do not want to paint on top of the breaking surface, so I’ll just be taping all that stuff off with regular blue painter’s tape.
So here’s my first caliper all ready to go. Now, I’m not going to worry about this part here because I’m going to replace this with a speed bleeder, so the original fitting will actually act as a plug to make sure I don’t get any paint inside of here. This here is just a cap that comes right off, so I can paint over it, no problem. The hard part is the actual caliper itself with the gasket that goes around it because you definitely don’t want to paint any of that stuff there. But I’ve got a trick for you. All you’re going to need for this is a Ziploc bag and a, that’s called a rubber band. Dumbass. All you’re going to need for this is a Ziploc bag and a rubber band. You can probably see where this is going, but I’ll show you anyway.
Okay, now that you’ve got your couple of pieces of Ziploc film, we can go ahead and cover up that piston. Now, I will admit that this is a little tricky, and it takes some finagling to get this rubber band back behind in here because this gasket pretty much is right up against the caliper frame itself. So it does take a little bit of maneuvering to get it back there. You just want to be real careful when you’re doing this that you don’t pop a hole in this because then you’ll get paint on your gasket, and also that you don’t puncture your gasket using a screwdriver or anything else because then you’ll ruin the piston. And once you’ve got this all wrapped around here like this with your rubber band down inside of there, you can just go around the edge. This part here, I pull up like this, and the rest of it, you just kind of tuck in. Nobody’s ever going to see this. This is basically just for protection, so I’m not too worried about if it’s perfect or not, just as long as it’s protecting this gasket. So I’m pretty much ready for paint. I apologize for the bad lighting; it’s what you get when you shoot at five o’clock in the afternoon in November.
So I’m using two different kinds of primer. I’m using this self-etching primer for these parts that aren’t going to get warm. That’s basically the parking brake parts right there. And I’ll be using the high heat primer for the drums and the calipers because they’re going to get pretty warm, and you can’t use regular primer for that. And then for both parts, I’m just using this high heat paint; that’s because what I have. All right, let’s get to painting. I just got Q-tips in these nuts here so I don’t get paint down inside the threads.
My, so, so, so, here we are with the finished product. You can see my final coat of matte black has gone on to the drums and onto the calipers. You can see that the masking job that I did here around the piston worked out real well. There’s still a couple of little places, and especially like under the gasket, that’s not painted, but that’s okay because the gasket covers that up. You’re never going to see it, and the gas is going to protect that from most of the road grime and dirt and things that are going to cause rust and corrosion in the future. I remember my primary reason for painting these was to try to prevent rust for as long as possible on these surfaces. A secondary reason is for looks, but really, you’re not going to see much of these behind my rims anyway, and if you do see them, I want them to just sort of disappear. I don’t need really bright colors or glossy paint on these because these aren’t performance parts; they’re just basically OEM parts, and I don’t really want people to see my calipers. I just kind of want them to blend into the background, so that’s why I chose this matte black color.
All this stuff over here has been painted. The only thing that I didn’t paint, of course, was the spring because you’ll want to paint that, and then, of course, the nuts and the bolts on the threads. I didn’t paint those. Everything else put a few coats on, and I’m happy with how it turned out. I want to make sure I don’t forget before I put this back in the truck to grease all this stuff up. I’m just using some white lithium grease to grease in all the metal-to-metal contact parts. So I just wanted to note here that I took a little rag and rubbed some of the extra grease that I had on some of these parts into a little bit of this metal plating just to put a little bit of a layer on there to help prevent rust in the future. I’m not sure if it’ll do a whole lot, but I used quite a bit of grease and had some extra laying around, so I’m just using a rag to rub some of that in.
So right there is where this all goes. I’m going to start by feeding my cable down into this hole. There we go, and I can get my fully lubricated assembly in here and hook it in. Oh, you know what? Don’t forget this has got to go through here, and then there we go. And then this piece here goes into there just like that. Okay, now I got to put in that bolt right there to hold it in place while I go to the front of the truck and fix the other two bolts in. And this one’s gonna be a pain in the because I got a nut that goes on top, and I got fat hands. My dumb ass thought another under the wrong one. All right, once that’s done.
So interestingly, this aftermarket cable here is a little bit different right here, this sleeve, because the original had one big long sleeve that threaded down through inside there. This is the original cable. The aftermarket cable that I bought has two different sleeve pieces that are both about the same size as this. Now, the original sleeve went actually down into the hole in the bottom here and sort of sealed it off. I’m not entirely sure why this is a two-piece. Both of them are exactly the same; there’s this piece here and then another rubber piece just like it. I’m assuming that one of those rubber pieces sort of has to go halfway through that hole to seal it off. I’m not sure if it should be the bottom piece or the top piece, but I’m going to go into the truck and see if I can’t get the bottom piece up through there.
This is a really weird angle, but at least here you can see what I’m talking about. You see how there’s two different sleeve pieces, this bottom piece and then the top piece? So just stick it up into the truck, and what I like to do is to get one of those two pieces actually inside this hole nice and snug to prevent any kind of stuff from the outside going through the inside. And so because I’d rather not have this piece hanging down underneath and be able to slide down, I’d rather push this piece here up into the truck and then use this piece as the sealing piece. So that’s what I’m going to do. I suppose probably should say that’s what I’m going to attempt to do.
Oh, look at that! It’s not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I mean, it’s not easy; that’s not that bad. Good! So my next job is going to be snaking that cable through these holes here in the body mount. Should be simple enough. There we go. One thing you’ll notice about me if you continue watching my channel for anything at the time is that I get sidetracked really easy. So I have not yet forgot about completing the mount of the parking brake mechanism in the front of the truck, but since I had to put this cable in, I’m just going to go ahead and get it hooked up back here. So this piece here goes on like this, and then this piece here goes on like this, and then we’ve got the nut that goes on like this. Let’s see, like this. Now, there we go. All right, so now I just have to… there’s the spring. Real quick, oh, let’s do this. Start first. There we go. The long side of the spring goes toward the front. Not that I don’t think it really matters, but that’s how it came off.
All right, now the other thing I’ve got left to do is to finish mounting the mechanism in the front and replace this passenger side brake cable. Man, I tell you this, if I go through to get usable video around here, you know, guys, as an aside, I have no idea what all this crap is. Like, there’s all this stuff in here that I don’t know. Like, the truck runs fine, right? I’m not a mechanic, so I have no idea what any of this is. It’s like all tied up or taped off or something like this. There’s a set of wires that doesn’t even go anywhere; they’re just cut off, and they go up into the cab. I mean, that’s really one of the things that I’ve gotta go through this truck with and figure out all this electrical stuff because I have no idea what the people that had this truck before me even did to it.
I almost forgot to reconnect my parking brake light, which is being stubborn. There it goes. Part one of the Bullnose Garage brake job special is officially a wrap. Now, I know it doesn’t seem like I did that much other than get my hands a little bit dirty, but I did take some things apart, worked on the parking brake, got the parking brake assembly out of the front of the truck, got it all cleaned up and lubed up, changed the front parking brake cable, got some of the hardware out, got it painted, painted my brake drums, painted my calipers, started putting in the parking brake cable for the other side, and ran into the issue where you’ve got to take this apart if you want to put the parking brake cable in there. So that’s gonna be next time.
Part two of the brake job special is gonna be me going through all these rear brakes, changing the shoes, of course, the drum, taking out all this hardware, replacing it with all new stuff. I’m gonna be going through all and replacing the wheels, wheel cylinders, of course, and going through and cleaning up these hubs. It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen, but there’s still a fair bit of rust on here. So I got this hub wheel hub resurfacing kit from Amazon, and we’re going to try that out and see how it works. Once that’s all nice and clean, we’re going to go through and paint this up the same way I painted my drums, again just to prevent rust and corrosion for as long as possible, and put them all back together and hopefully test it out and make sure that it works.
Of course, the episode after that, we’re going to go to the front. I’m going to do rotors, hubs, wheel bearings, calipers, pads, the whole nine yards up there. So make sure you stay tuned for that. Guys, if you enjoyed this video, if you learned something new, if you’d like to support the channel, make sure you give me a like. That really helps me out. And hey, you know, if you want to make sure that you catch the rebuilding of all this stuff here, the rear brakes and the front brakes, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell so you know when I put out new videos. I’ll be doing a bunch of stuff like this. I’ve got at least two more brake videos coming out. I may have another one depending on how things go that’s sort of an offshoot of actually doing the brakes themselves. But yeah, make sure you stay tuned for that stuff. There’s a lot of stuff coming up, so looking forward to that. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we’ll see you next time in part two.
