Originally I was thinking that a good first point would be to fix the front driveshaft. I think that the kid who owned it before me was probably out digging and got into something he couldn't get out of. For anyone who has sadly forgotten their Cache Valley-ese, diggin' is going out in a wet field, putting the vehicle in four wheel drive, and driving around with the accelerator floored. This produces a shower of mud and cuts trenches in the field. Diggn' is to dumb teenage hicks with four wheel drive vehicles as the train is to the peacock; a way to display virility to susceptible females of the species. In humans, this behavior is often of limited effectiveness, as it is not often possible to lure a female of the species out into a wet muddy field to watch the display. In such a case, it usually serves as a means of convincing competing males of the subject's superior virility. Because every male knows deep, deep down that one's virility is determined by the power output of his vehicle's engine and the rate at which it can consume fuel.
Also, diggin' is... really fun.
Anyway, given that my truck is an excellent machine for converting gasoline into noise instead of power, I suspect it wasn't too hard for the kid who owned it to get himself in over his head far out in a wet field. The sensible thing to do at this point is use a winch if you've got it, or get a friend with a bigger truck, or better still, a tractor, to pull you out. But remember the ostensible purpose of digging? Such sense reduces the sperm count and sex organ size exponentially. I think that he then probably just stood too hard on the gas and the rusty old drive shaft broke at the u-joint.
Originally I thought the broken bits were still connected to the u-joint, but upon closer inspection I found they were gone forever, dead and buried in some Clarckston farmer's field. So there would be no driveshaft welding for me. A new one is $250, and four wheel drive hasn't really proven necessary for me. So the driveshaft is on hold.
Item two on the list was the titular apple sauce brakes. All mush, with the brake pedal almost on the floor.
The first thing Mr Forsberg and I did after I bought the truck was to bleed the brakes. They felt far better when we did, and I thought we'd cracked it. But within two days they were mush again. In the time between this weekend and then I've developed a very healthy following distance on the road. In fact it saved me on the freeway a couple weeks ago. I came upon a seven car pileup very rapidly, and was able to use my eight to ten car length following distance to slow way down and swerve onto an off ramp. The guy too close behind me locked up his brakes trying to stop and fishtailed into the cement barrier at slow speed.
None the less, it was obvious from the beginning that the brakes as they were weren't going to cut it in the long run.
I thought that the problem must be the master cylinder. There was a mess of fluids covering everything in the engine bay, and I though some of it could be brake fluid, leaked from bad seals on the master. So I stopped at Autozone on the way to Cache Valley and got a new reconditioned unit. When I arrived around two in the afternoon on Saturday, Mr. Forsberg pointed out that although I hadn't seen any leaking on the wheel cylinders on the front brakes, the rears were drums, and you wouldn't be able to see leaking brake fluid inside of them. He thought we should check them first, and it is well we did. They were a complete shambles.
These are a new pair of brake shoes. They surround the hub in a drum brake, and when you step on the brake pedal, a little hydraulic actuator pushes them outward against the steel drum that caps the assembly. It's kind of like bicycle brakes, except rather than squeezing in on the rim, it pushes out on the drum. See that half an inch of grey stuff on the outside of the shoes? That's what rubs on the drum and stops the vehicle. FYI, they used to make that of asbestos, so if you're changing old drums, try not to breath. Because those pads turn into a really fine dust when they burn down.
Anyway, here's a picture of the brake shoes we discovered when we removed the drums.
That shiny stuff you see is bare metal. It's not that effective for stopping. Also, the internals were indeed wet with leaked brake fluid. The hydraulic cylinders were rusted messes, and the whole mechanism on the driver side had failed and started coming apart. The shoe on the bottom in the picture below was from the driver side.
See how it is worn into an abnormal shape? That's because the cylinder and one of the springs had failed. The result was that the shoe and eventually the drum had gone wonky and were slowly self-destructing.
And craphands but it was a mess to put them together. We worked on it from 2:00 in the afternoon Saturday until about 10:30 at night. The reason we stopped then was that we got a defective wheel cylinder. The hole into which the brake line screwed was too large, so it wouldn't thread. We worked on that for about an hour and a half alone before we gave up on it and tried to take it back. Unfortunately Autozone was closed for the day. We went the next morning. It was our fifth trip during the project.
With the exception of a couple relatively sizable breaks, we worked on them from around noon Sunday until around 9:30 that night.
Mr Forsberg swore in no uncertain terms that he would never, ever, ever help me with a set of drum brakes again. I'm not much more inclined to tinker with them. They're an amazing pain.
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