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A.b.s. bleeding fail

Stoney

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Okay so as many of y'all know I've been having an ongoing problem with my brake system. This spans back a handful of years. Come to find out your supposed to bleed the ABS box after the brake job because the system had went dry and changed the master cylinder so air got in the ABS box. Month or two ago we put hey tech 2 scanner on the truck and did the auto bleed feature for the ABS. After performing the bleed I noticed that the bleeder pin on the ABS box that faces the engine was missing. I know it was there before we did it. I will post pictures so you know what I'm talking about. Evidently there is only a lower bleeder facing the engine if you have drum brakes. Anyhow as I said the lower pin disappeared I don't know if it fell out somehow or if it got sucked into the box somehow.. so I got another ABS box from the junkyard this week. I checked and made sure all the pins were present Honda upper bleeder facing the fender the lower one facing the engine and both of the ones under the brake lines. I installed the ABS box today. I gravity bled all the lines. We hooked up then tech 2 scanner, ran the auto bleed feature. And guess what.. the same pin on The New abs box disappeared. WTF.!!! This one has me completely baffled.
First pic is the upper bleeder showing what pin I'm talking about. Bottom one should look same and did until we performed Auto bleed second pic is lower bleeder after auto bleed
 

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Mine is the same way. I think that if that pin is showing on that side, it means it's been tripped. an easy test would be (once figuring out if this is front or rear) open the line after the abs box to create a broken line scenario and stomp on the pedal. that pin should pop back out again.

of course you'll be bleeding the brakes again after you do this.

I don't know if that pin runs all the way though as one long pin between both sides. if it is, then it should be visible on the opposite side.
 
It feels a little better. But we didn't get to actually bleed each brake after doing the auto bleed. Gonna do that in morning. I had let it gravity bleed for about a hour so shouldn't be much for air in the lines. I only know it's a little better cause I had to drive it half a mile up the road to gas station to get milk for the kid. It didn't drag like it usually does. But I'm not counting on that being permanently fixed because as I've said in the past the dragging problem is intermittent sometimes it does it sometimes it doesn't. And only going half a mile up the road wasn't much of a test at 20 mph
 
get you a cheap ray temp gun handy, after a longer drive, stop somewhere and check the temp or each. front will be a little different temp than the rear but should be relatively the same. if there is a 50+ deg difference on one wheel. depending on if rear or front, we can help you diagnose a fix.

front would be sticking caliper or collapsed hose. rear could simply be one side adjusted tighter than the other. other odd things could be kinked steel line or sticking wheel cylinder and or weak brake springs
 
I would agree with you but every part you mentioned has been replaced 4-5 times. Literally. Hoses, calipers, pads rotors, drums, shoes, springs, wheel cylinders. It's seriously made me consider just scraping the truck.
 
another thing I thought about is when your feeling what seems like a drag. drive into a parking lot somewhere. get up to about a fast paced walking speed and then pop it into neutral and feel how the truck comes to a stop without touching the brake pedal. if it rolls to a stop with a little jerk similarly like when you stop too fast at a stop sign ( feeling a lunge right at the point of no motion) of course that feeling will be very light at walking speed. or even get out and attempt pushing it in neutral on flat paved surface.

given what the truck weighs and the momentum at a fast paced walking speed it should do a free roll for few feet before completely stopping. with it being in neutral, this should help determine if the issue is in the braking system or the drive train.

I feel like you have done everything on the braking side and hopefully should be good now. as for the other thread on the muck in the fuel tank that could also cause what feels like an intermittent drag. how did that go after the cleaning btw?
 
@ak diesel driver can you or one of the guys explain to me the procedure to flush the power steering fluid? I siphoned a bunch out of the pump and it was black. I want to go flush it out while I'm working on the brake system since it's connected to the hydroboost.
 
there's a thread here somewhere that THEFERMANATOR posted on flushing the PS system. I've linked it a couple of times but it's fairly a simple process to do.

Pull the return line from the HB and plug it going back into the pump. connect a hose on the HB where the return line clamped to and drop the other end into a bucket. top off the pump with fluid and start it up. steer left and right once while intermittently pressing the brake pedal and releasing. stop the engine as soon as you hear the pump cavitate refill the pump with fresh fluid and go again. iirc when I did mine I got one turn lock to lock and a couple of pedal presses until it ran out of fluid pushing it into the bucket.

keep repeating this process until you have nothing but clean fluid coming out of the hose going into the bucket. if you time it just right you can learn when to stop and refill just before the pump runs out! You'll need at minimum a gallon of fluid. possibly two gallons depending on how dirty the system is.

Ak might have a better explanation that I do :)
 
@ak diesel driver can you or one of the guys explain to me the procedure to flush the power steering fluid? I siphoned a bunch out of the pump and it was black. I want to go flush it out while I'm working on the brake system since it's connected to the hydroboost.
If you haven't, Try doing a search here.

It seems there was a very good thread on flushing the power steering
 
My apologizes I was mistaken, @btfarm posted this. here is the link to it..

 
@Stoney
DO NOT DO IT NOW.

Cardinal rule: fix one problem at a time when you are having any diagnostic problems.
Get the brakes bled all the way and test drive it. Notate how well it stops, drags, etc.

Then do the flush. Retest performance after that.

If something goes crazy wrong, or if something improves: you are guessing what was the cause.
 
@Will L. Agreed. Just wanted the sequence so I'm ready when the time comes. We bleed the lines today, weird.. not the pedal is intermittent.. sometimes stiff, sometimes really squishy. But truck stops decent. But sometimes the brakes grab real hard real fast.. might still have air in the lines.. I can get the power bleeder tomorrow so I'll try bleeding them that way.. I guess it could possibly be air in the M.C. but that doesn't sound right either because I wouldn't get the hard pedal at times I don't think. The dragged feeling seems to be a lot less frequent. Also. If I'm driving and get on brakes hard the brake light comes on . It seems like if it's dragging and light is off and I go on to dirt and slam brakes it triggers abs , the light comes on , but then it doesn't drag.. didn't drive it much so not 💯 percent. It could of been coincidence.
 
Upon further review, I actually think the master cylinder could be bad. Spongey feeling, eradicate pedal (sometimes spongey sometimes seriously hard, ) and I noticed that even though I put all fresh fluid in the truck yesterday, when I opened master cylinder tonight the new fluid already looks a little dingey
 
I don't know how how the abs box works but the brake light coming on is ether a warning of low pressure or it's just telling you the ABS is activating. others that know more will chime in on that.

as for the dingy fluid, since you installed a used (new to you) ABS box and you have now activated it in use and not by the tech 2 there will be residue and muck that was stuck and settled in the motors and pumps now is stirred up in the system. for that. I would go do some more dirt road sliding or some wet grass sliding and then flush everything again. you'll never get all the muck out of the system of this age but can get it as much stirred up as possible and flush it with fresh clean fluid. Besides sliding and fishtailing in the dirt and grass is fun haha.

it is possible on the MC being bad, but also didn't you install a delco unit this time around? did you check with the dealer that the one you have is correct? heavy vs standard duty
 
@dbrannon79 yes the new one is Delco. Unfortunately I got it from rock auto so not like I can go exchange it. Gotta cough up the cash again to them then ship this one back to them and wait for a refund.. that ain't gonna happen any time soon. Probably after the first of the year. I didn't check with dealer as to if it's the right one. But I better do that before replacing it. I assumed r.a. new what they were doing selling parts. But maybe not... Yeah you could be right about the fluid. I didn't think of the abs being old. No clue how long it's been sitting..
 
Ok so a update.. since doing the auto bleed sequence on The New abs box, brakes are a million times better. And that I can tell they are not dragging anymore. Kind of hard to tell because the transmission is slipping bad. Because it leaks like a sieve. Going to try changing the pan gasket tomorrow and putting two bottles of Lucas stop slip in it. Hopefully it stops the slipping. And I have to get a new master cylinder when cash allows. Because the pedal is spongy and goes down quite a bit and takes a long time to come back up sometimes. I think I'm just going to buy one local and send this one back to RockAuto.
 
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