Tag parking brake cable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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