The Stovebolt Site Forums The Parking Lot Big Bolts Progress on the 2 Ton

In preperations for the upcoming All Truck Nationals and Stovebolt Reunion I've been wanting to get another of my projects on the road and to the show. So I took a long weekend off work last week (Was needing a couple mental health days) and decided to thrash on my 2 Ton some.
Here's what I got done.

• Pulled and rebuilt the Master Cylinder.
• Front wheel cylinders (one rebuilt, one replaced).
• New front brake pads. (Wow 14inch by 2.5inch)
• Cleaned all the old grease out of the bearings inspected and repacked them with new grease.
• Replaced all the hard brake line and all rubber lines with new. (Some was copper?? Glad I replaced it all.)
• Replaced all the fuel line.
• Cleaned up the front hubs and painted them.
• Cleaned up the front wheels, painted, and had new tires installed.
• Removed the Hydrovac to be rebuilt at a later date.
• Replaced the ground and power cables on the battery with new.

This weekend I went back up to the farm to finish the work.

• Pulled the rear wheels to inspect the brakes and decided not to rebuild the wheel cylinders at this time, everything there looked great.
• Bled the whole system.
• Cleaned out the cab, the usual mouse leavings, dirt, dust...
• Torched the grain box sides and front off the flatbed (That amounted to 37 feet of cutting torching) they were welded on.

Next after giving the engine (That run's great since I got the truck) a quick once over. Went ahead and and test drove it into town. She stops great once the brakes engage but still takes more pedal than I prefer, not sure if this is due to the lack of the HydroVac in the system or if I need to do some more bleeding, the shop manual recommends bleeding the brakes with a pressure bleeder is this a must with the big trucks?
Next I started the long trek back to KC at 45 MPH. About 3 hours later I rolled into my buddy Jerry's place to show him "Big Red" or "Lucky #7" as I've started calling it.
I'll follow this post up with some pics and detail on some of the stuff I did. So hold off for a few on the reply's til I can write up the other bits.

MONGO

Master Cylinder
First the Master Cylinder the only part that seems small on this big bruiser.
Here's what it looked like before.
First I drained it down and got it on the wire wheels to clean up the rust and crud on it. Here's how it turned out.
Next I finished the tear down and inspected all the Old Parts they didn't look too bad, but I'm already to this point huh?
We then setup the hone in the drill press. We used a little kerosene sprayed into the cylinder while honeing. It turned out good we were able to polish out all the grooves that had built up over the years.
Paint came next, althought now in retrospect while bleeding the brakes the brake fluid stripped some of the paint off so next time I might try powder coating. Finally the rebuild parts were installed and it's good to go. Here's the final product here and here.

Mongo

Front hubs
The Front hubs were taken all the way down to the spindles.
Here's how the hubs looked before.
I wire wheeled all the rust off them then painted them up with some good enamel paint. This is paint we've used for years around the farm and it hold up good outside. And the results still wet.
While the paint dried I worked on rebuilding the wheel cylinders one honed out fine and rebuilt just fine the other was grooved too deep so I replaced it. All the other components were cleaned up and painted.
The shoes on one side looked fine, lot's of life left, on the other side one of the pads had seperated badly so I ended up getting some replacement pads. 14 inch by 2.5 inch, those are some big pads. After closer examination I noticed one of the 4 pads did not have one of the holes used to hold the shoes to the backing plate. I made a pattern, marked up the offending pad and drilled it.
Then put it all back together.
Here's a quick pic of the inner and outer bearings and other parts.
Here's a pic of the center cap and gasket. since I didn't have a replacement gasket and the original wasn't in that good a shape I gummed it up with some good old High temp RTV seal.
And bolted it all back up.

Til my next installment...
Mongo

Those look like roller bearings. Did they use rollers on the bigger trucks? I've not taken any of my big ones apart yet.

Lines
According to my master parts book the 2 ton lines are over 25 feet long so I picked up a coil of bulk 1/4 inch tubing and a couple long straight pieces.
I removed the old lines one section at a time and formed the new tubing to match as close as I could,
Here's a shot of the lines where the Hydrovac used to be. You can see the large vacume line coming down in the bottom left corner and one of the two brake lines near the center of the picture.
Here's a shot of the same place after the new line was installed, notice the temporary crossover piece running through the center of the area where the booster goes, this piece will be removed when the booster goes back in.
Here's a shot of the rebuilt master cylinder and the new line.

Something I removed from the system that I don't plan on putting back is this it's a solinoid that locks the pressure on the rear brakes to help the parking brake hold the truck when heavily loaded. I'll leave the switch on the dash for now.

Ok, I'll take this back up tommorow night as I'm dozing off. Feel free to post now.
Mongo

Like the pictures. Old Sub on my 38 they still had ball barings rather than the roller bearings not sure whether the advance design were 1st to use the roller bearings.

OldSub, yeah they were barrel shaped bearings, from what I understand from other big bolters those particular bearings are pretty pricy, I got good pictures so I could look up the numbers later.
Mongo

I too have a 2-ton. I haven't gotten to the brakes on mine yet but I'm curious as to one thing though. When it comes to restoring the brakes back to originality...are all parts for the entire brake system on the 2-tons available? I was under the impression that the hydrovac cannot be rebuilt due to lack of parts. Is this true? Also, has anyone upgraded the brakes to a more modern version. If so, what are the options. Again...I haven't gotten to this point yet, just doing my homework first so I'm prepared when the time comes.

Thanx fellers!

Most of the parts are available within a couple days from your local NAPA if you have patient people at the counter. It helps to have the GM part numbers from the Master parts book for them to cross reference. I plan on adding those part numbers when I convert this writeup to my website, if you need any of them when you get going on the project let me know. The only parts that aren't really available from what I've gotten to are the parts for the rear Axle, You can get rebuild kits for the rear wheel cylinders (4 of them) but not replacements. So if they are scored too bad and you can't hone them out you'll have to send them off to a company to sleeve them. (There's been threads here on that before) Also the rear brake pads are no longer available (that I've found) so you would have to pull them and have them relined. Not a big deal but mainly just more time. Those pads are 4 inches wide and 15 inches around so they are HUGE....

On the Hydrovac.. I'll be writing that up when I get into rebuilding it. Rebuilt one's are available from Jim Carters for around $275 with a Core charge if you don't send in the Core of $175.
I talked to the guys at BSC parts warehouse (www.bscparts.com) Rick is the guy there you'd need to talk to. He says he can put together a Hydrolic kit for it for about $95 (That would be all the rubber parts) and if you need the Leather diaphram he's out of stock on it right now but it would be $135.
People I know who have rebuilt them before say they are a piece of cake, so we'll see how it goes. I won't likely get into mine til after the truck show in september.
MONGO

I just spent 2 hours scouring your site,it's awesome !I'm rebuilding a 53'4400 and am pretty new to automotive work.You have excellent pics and documentation,I printed a bunch of those ads and explored your tech library and noticed that the holes for your 216 front motor mount are marked as 1"wide but only .5"high.They appear round from the diagram,I wasn't sure if it was a typo or something.I enjoyed your site and will definitely refer to it for my own project.thanks
skippy the townie

Skippy: Glad you enjoyed it, I've got a lot of other stuff I need to post but haven't got around to it.
On the diagram for the motor mount, the dimension your looking at is for both holes so it's an inch .5 + .5 = 1 the holes are round and .5 in diameter.
MONGO