• Welcome to The Truck Stop! We see you haven't REGISTERED yet.

    Your truck knowledge is missing!
    • Registration is FREE , all we need is your birthday and email. (We don't share ANY data with ANYONE)
    • We have tons of knowledge here for your diesel truck!
    • Post your own topics and reply to existing threads to help others out!
    • NO ADS! The site is fully functional and ad free!
    CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

    Problems registering? Click here to contact us!

    Already registered, but need a PASSWORD RESET? CLICK HERE TO RESET YOUR PASSWORD!

Bye-bye Gov-Lock, Hello Tru Trac, plus gear swap and brakes

Ok. It’s good having friends in the IT department at work: he let me borrow one of their older laptops with Windows 7 on it.

I finally got Tech 2 to work. It took a lot of fumbling and the opening of programs in a specific order, but it finally works. Unfortunately I got this message:

View attachment 52850

Sonuva!!!! That’s the one thing I bought this for and what I’ve wrestled with this thing for 3 days for!!! I’m going to contact the manufacturer and hope I get someone that speaks English.
Good luck with that.:D That does suck.
 
Ok. It’s good having friends in the IT department at work: he let me borrow one of their older laptops with Windows 7 on it.

I finally got Tech 2 to work. It took a lot of fumbling and the opening of programs in a specific order, but it finally works. Unfortunately I got this message:

View attachment 52850

Sonuva!!!! That’s the one thing I bought this for and what I’ve wrestled with this thing for 3 days for!!! I’m going to contact the manufacturer and hope I get someone that speaks English.
That sucks. Everything I read on other forums said it did it all. GM is even using the tech2win software in combination with the MDI 2 for dealerships to work on vehicles prior to 06 since they've abandoned the Tech 2.
 
That sucks. Everything I read on other forums said it did it all. GM is even using the tech2win software in combination with the MDI 2 for dealerships to work on vehicles prior to 06 since they've abandoned the Tech 2.
Yeah. That does suck. How can that be though? What version of the software would they have copied that wouldn’t support the older vehicles? It’s probably not that simple since I don’t even computer, bro.

Surprisingly I have received 2 emails from the seller on Amazon today.

Here is my original email this morning:

D45B200F-88DE-46F8-93DE-6D532EEB2D6A.png

I received this response within about 10 minutes:

EC9DEB13-6878-4712-99F0-63F2AFA62D79.png

My response:

B92E9A06-3F62-4F50-BE2B-9C75C419FDC6.jpeg

Another email I received. I can’t tell if it was in response to my original email or the second email. We’ll see what they are able to find out. How would they know their customers are using it on older vehicles? I’m not super optimistic, but we’ll see.

C8A5998C-4CE6-403A-B83A-B01A80413197.png
 
After you told me about this they told me the same thing. I’ll download the app tomorrow and start a conversation I guess. At least they acknowledge that they are from another country.

50B31B89-872E-4C63-8ADA-2F87B0945150.png
 
Just remember that FaceCrook owns Whatsapp. And despite statements of no sharing of data between the two, well, just read the news about how likely that is given the reputation of excessive data mining and hiding disclosure from the consumer . . .

Might want to check if the vendor uses either Viber or Whisper.
 
Since I won’t have a computerized solution anytime soon I finally just went to a dirt road and did a ton of panic stops to make the abs cycle. I just bled the brakes and I finally have a good pedal. I think I’ll be changing my gear oil Saturday, so if I do, I’ll put the 1-3/16” wheel cylinders back in to give those another try.
 
The tech2win is supposed to work on anything obd2, so 96+. It is a virtual tech 2 machine that allows the same software a tech 2 uses to run on a pc(32 bit windows 7 since the software is older).
 
Drove the Tahoe on the highway for the first time since the gear change. I love it! No more gear noise and the lower rpm made a nice difference to engine noise. It still carries about 4psi at 75mph, but I do notice that it isn’t quite as snappy as before when you mash the pedal at that speed. No biggie. Once it spools it’s motorin’.

The reason for the highway drive was to get the axle warm before draining the gear lube. There was just a little bit of metal on the magnet, but nothing to worry about since gears and bearings were all new. Just for funsies I decided to check the backlash and pattern now that the gears have 500 miles on them. The backlash is .007”, so that’s cool. The pattern was saying it needed a little more backlash, but since the gears are quiet I didn’t want to mess with it.

98E55DD9-56B2-4DF8-9BD4-A02C52638BA9.jpeg CB5E642E-F121-4AFB-982B-106820C05A53.jpeg

While I was working on the truck I decided to put the 1-3/16” wheel cylinders back in the rear brakes. My initial impression was that the brakes were more responsive and the rear brakes could lock more easily. I continued to drive and test the brakes and after just a couple panic stops the front brakes were already fading badly and the pedal was soft. Not impressed. I’m going to keep driving it and evaluating, but I think I may end up either going back to the EBC pads or maybe try Hawk. Not sure yet..... I wish I had seen that a GMT800 swap was so easy and affordable before I invested in this setup. Hopefully I can make this setup work better and not waste the money I spent on the rotors, calipers and hoses - all things I would have to change out with an 800 swap.
 
Ever since testing the brakes Saturday my pedal has been a little mushy. Tonight I bled the brakes and I got more air out of the rear brakes. I don’t get it. I can’t believe there is still air in the ABS module at this point with the number of times I’ve tripped the ABS. I’m starting to think that the master cylinder is going bad and the timing of the failure is just a bad coincidence. Or maybe the ABS module is getting air in it somehow? I’ll keep working on it and see what I can figure out.

Yesterday after researching quite a bit, I decided to go with Hawk LTS pads. I also found a P30 master cylinder for $30 so I also ordered that. I ordered the master cylinder just thinking that I wanted to see what it did to pedal feel once I found a solid setup, but now that I’m suspicious of the master cylinder I’ll install it ASAP.
 
I finally have brakes!!! Here’s what I did:

Yesterday I received the P30 master cylinder so I installed it after work. I bench bled the master until I got no more bubbles and then after installation I bled the entire brake system completely again. I read the manual for the Mityvac vacuum pump and it suggested putting grease or teflon tape on the bleeders to improve the seal. Grease made a big improvement most of the time. You could just give the tool a few pumps and it would hold the vacuum instead of having to keep pumping and pumping and pumping to maintain a decent vacuum. PLUS, without the extra air I could finally see when I was drawing air out of the sytem and when it was done, rather than just running a crap-ton of fluid through the sytem and hope it got it all. I found out it actually takes less fluid until all the air is out than what I thought. I also found out that the new master cylinder has a much smaller reservoir on the rear brake side than the old master cylinder - I had to be much more careful about running the reservoir dry while running the pump. I did have the grease not work so well on the front bleeders so I put teflon tape on them and that did the trick.

Anyway....I got the master cylinder installed, bled it and then decided to drive to the dirt road to run the abs a bit and make sure I got all the air out. The brakes did feel better, but still not great. Definitely not WOW which is what I was hoping for by swapping on a new and oversized master cylinder. So I cycled the abs probably 6 times and then came home and bled it. I didn’t notice any more air. When all was said and done I had a little better brake pedal feel, but again not great. It was also inconsistent. Sometimes it was like, “oh, there’s the pedal” and other times it was like, “eww, that was mushy”. All the while I never felt like the fronts were really biting - the backs were doing a lot of the work. Big nugget here is that the P30 master cylinder is a direct bolt-on, no other changes needed to install it. Here are some pics of the install:

1D5A85E6-2544-42A4-A0ED-D1D7BC259F43.jpeg EF05EFA5-5B9A-4FF1-BC5A-4B9995D11963.jpeg D03A81CB-4499-492A-8D55-99F67FEE58C4.jpeg A9B7DB13-A4DB-4A1C-9AC2-E71251E0B7AF.jpeg

This is the Raybestos part number:

FD4FE02E-033D-42FA-922C-CA4386B5D2F8.jpeg

So tonight was time to install the Hawk pads. I took care to do a good job and not make any mistakes. I burnished the rotors with some Roloc discs to deglaze them. Before:

8F173181-C9B6-4416-A1AD-A1AD31C4F5BF.jpeg

After:

364FF661-7623-4B29-880D-602440427998.jpeg

I didn’t take any pics, but I did grind the outside pad again so the oversized 370 pads would clear the rotor hat. I took apart the caliper pins and to my surprise they were dry! I never took them apart the first time I did the brakes, but assumed they were lubed from the manufacturer. Guess not. Oops. What made me think of that was some other reading I had done trying to figure out my brake problems. Some reading I did made 3M Silicone Paste sound like pretty good stuff so I decided to get some. So I slathered that liberally in the pin grommets to make sure those will slide smoothly. I also applied another coating of anti-seize compound on the metal slide surfaces like I normally do.

So then it was time to test drive and bed the pads. As soon as I hit the pedal once the calipers pumped back up I could already tell the pedal was MUCH harder. NICE! THIS is what I’ve been looking for. So I took the drive and did 5 stops from 70-ish to about 10-15. Much more predictable and it was definitely biting. I was tripping the front and rear abs on dry asphalt! The pads never really felt like they faded much, though I could smell them and I think I saw a little smoke too finally. Very pleased. So then I drove about 10 minutes at 55-ish so they could cool back down. Then I went home and parked it. I’m looking forward to good brakes tomorrow!

So I’m pretty disappointed that pads were giving me so much trouble. Unfortunately there are a few variables here so I don’t know what the smoking gun is. Do those pads suck? Did I screw up the pads because I was struggling with air in the system when I was needing to bed the pads? Were the dry pins affecting the feel? Did the stack up of the red coating on the calipers and the ceramic coating on the pads add some spring in the pedal? All questions without answers right now. I’m just glad it works the way I want now.

Here are pics of the old pads. It’s weird the shims are peeling up....not sure what that means.

A21AE71E-24FD-423A-8950-2D8571D91EBA.jpeg BB1CA087-DFAD-45E7-880B-191E933F9AD2.jpeg 78F04C0E-0BCD-4EC2-875A-C043D7B80DC2.jpeg
 
that means you had plenty of hydraulic pressure but the pads weren't biting
What he said. You smooshed the shim from so much pressure on the pads. Thats why I posted earlier on about having the same problem with Akebono's which are supposed to be the best of the best(never again).
 
Look glazed over to me.
I guess the way I look at it, at first you probably didn't have enough braking pressure. After you got everything bled, it was too late. Though you now had enough pressure. As indicated in the pics with the backing pads smooshed.
I don't know, maybe you got them hot enough to melt the backer under the pressure of the brake piston.

Sent from my SM-G892A using Tapatalk
 
Back
Top