I drove down yesterday with an uneventful trip.
Got to Karp's Power Brake about 10:30 ( okay - so I slept in till 3:41 instead of 2:00 ) and picked up the master cylinder and power booster. Jeff took a good 20 minutes going over things with me and gave me some good suggestions for my initial efforts with the brakes after getting the system bled. I will write about them in another post tonight, after they work.
I got back to Retro and immediately sprayed the lug nuts with PB Blaster in anticipation of Pete's coming out tomorrow (actually today as I write this) to put new tires on - a little blaster should help with getting the rusty looking lugs off.
Then I proceeded to spray paint the new brake parts red. It's not that I like red, you understand, it's that I like color coding engineering system components. If there are 4 3/8" metallic lines running along a section of frame rail, which one is brakes and which are fuel? I will know, when I am done with Retro, because the fuel lines will be purple and the brake lines will be red. Vacuum will be yellow, clean water blue and waste water brown. In addition, the lines have white stripes (more blobs really at this point) for each individual segment of line - one blob closest to engine, two blobs for next most distal segment etc. I am disoriented enough upside down under a car, any help I can get is gladly accepted.
I spiffed up the bolts etc. for the master cylinder and proceeded to install it. Sort of. Mostly. You see, there is this spring. It sort of fell out of a little box section of the chassis in front of the master cylinder. It fell out before I could use my whiffy jiffy $69 Harbor Frieght inspection camera to see where the other end was hooked on inside the box section. The end I could see was connected to the clevis pin that attaches the brake pedal linkage to the master cylinder yoke. This is the pedal return spring and is probably kind of important. I used my camera to look for where I would hook on. Did I mention disorientation under the bus? Multiply that by a zillion when using the inspection camera. The camera end of the flexible shaft tends to spin around so you don't know which way is up unless you pay attention to the little white arrow on top of the camera end. Anyway, I took useless pictures with my cellphone camera. I finally found it by feeling around. It is a little hole in a lip on the bottom front of the box section, about 1/4 of the way from the passenger side of the box. (consider this as otherwise unfindable on the Internet knowledge). Getting the spring on was a whole nother story - it is not an evil spring.... well maybe not TOTALLY evil.. The routine is to get the front of the spring hooked on to the chassis, use vice grips to pull the spring taut slip a screwdriver into the hook part of the spring and put the end of the screwdriver behind the yoke of the pedal linkage (with clevis and cotter installed) to leverage the spring even more taut then re-position the vice grips further away from the end of the spring remove screwdriver and slip spring end over notchy part on clevis pin. Springs fly when suddenly released from tension. This easy to understand 84 odd word sentence is the result of 45 minutes of cussing, flying springs, and sheer determined tenacity. Probably 40 trials of other technique and about 5 of this one. Good Luck if you ever have to re-install this spring. It can be done and if you have beefy manly muscles (I don't) it will probably be easier. I am a particularly doughy variety of techno-geek.
The booster went on with no complaints, the 2 section line from the master to the booster installed and initial efforts at bleeding the system started. More about bleeding in a later post. Daylight's a wasting.
o7
No comments:
Post a Comment