The Stovebolt Site Forums The Parking Lot Big Bolts 59 Spartan 80 Update

I can finally drive my 59 2.5 ton! I spent 1 month de-firetrucking it and 2 months trying to get brakes. And now I can finally drive it AND stop it.

With a lot of help from you guys here, I was able to find the parts I needed and get all of the brakes rebuilt or replaced but I could never get a proper pedal and did not have brakes. Nothing was leaking and I was very frustrated. I knew that everything should work. My Dad and I have pumped and bled and pumped and bled and vacuum bled and pressure bled and nothing seemed to work.

With my Dad's lack of experience working on anything of this size and my total lack of experience I felt the problem was in the brake adjustment and/or not getting it completely bled. After my last round I wanted to take it to a mechanic friend nearby with truck experience. My Dad and I were trying to figure out how to get it to the mechanic and Dad said let me drive it and see how it feels. He drove it around the back yard the up the drive then hit the road. After a few bad words I jumped in my truck with flashers flashing and followed him the mile or so to the mechanics place. Definitely not recommended and luckily we are in a pretty rural area and it only cost us a couple of pairs of underwear.

After a week the guy got around to checking it out and the diagnosis was...Needed bleeding and the brakes needed adjusting. He said he couldn't get it to bleed either but he noticed the bleed screw on the slave cylinder attached to the hydrovac was pointing straight down which prevented the air from escaping. Once he rotated the cylinder so the screw was at the top, it bled fine and now I have brakes!

At first I felt bad that they defeated me, but I just did not have the know-how to get it done. I will post new pics of it now that it is without the body when I get home this evening. Thanks, everyone, for your input and advice. Now I can move onto some of the more "fun" parts of fixing it up.
Gene

Do not feel bad I have found the factory manual to be lacking in many areas.

Then who knows if I would of seen the bleed screw upside down.

Your doing just fine.

Welcome!! GREAT job! My friend's been working on the brakes on his'59 Viking bus for 3 years,and still NO BRAKES!! I AGREE with 32vid! "You're doing just fine"!

I was adjusting the parking brakes on the 1946 2 ton with my son today after I posted earlier.

During a lull in the action I looked for the bleeder valve on the power assist unit. There it was on top.

I replaced the original hydrovac after bleeding the thing 100 times and then realized that was where my brake fluid was going. When I put the new one on I noticed immediatly the bleeder was not where the old one was. Being a newb I thought "it must not matter because they surely would have assembled it correctly". It makes total sense that the air would need to be bled on top. I even had that concern at the back wheel cylinders because the bleeders are on the bottom of the bottom wheel cylinders. But because of the banjo connections the bleeder could not go on the top outlet. Anyway, glad to have brakes, live and learn.