I was going to pick up a new to me boat. Something larger for the family needs as well as a platform to support the high school bass fishing team. My truck is aging and relegated to occasional use now. It’s primary function was supposed to be winter driveway plowing.
I get to the seller’s house, we consummate the deal and I hook up the boat. As I’m pulling away, the brake pedal goes to the floor, no brakes! The handbrake I always use to hold the truck when launching goes all the way to the end of travel and very little braking. Yikes! Thankfully, I am able to bring the rig to a stop but just barely. The dual master circuit didn’t help so it must be both lines and the parking brake seems to have failed as well. A unlikely scenario for sure.
Opening the hood and exercising the brakes, there is a huge leak in the brake lines coming from the master, spraying fluid like a cloud with each brake press. The parts of the lines I can see look fine, not rusted or ballooned out. What are the odds? I feel unlucky as I disconnect the boat and call for a tow. But while waiting I realize, imagine if I had this 3000 lb load going down the road at 50mph and then lost all braking?? We were actually very lucky it all failed when it did.
Even with reasonably diligent maintenance and yearly inspections here, sometimes the worst scenario can play out. I guess I should go buy the billion dollar lottery ticket…
I was angling thru parking lot in open area and another car had same idea and came into my path and I hammered brakes and blew a line. Found rusted line under plastic shield. Plastic shield does good job of hiding brake lines.
I had a bone-head pull out in front of my Avalanche. I stomped on the brakes and blew out both circuits. Rusty brake lines are a problem for early 2000s Chevy 1/2 ton trucks and SUVs.
And the parking brake - a drum inside the brake hat - never really worked, even when new.
I going with very lucky. Over the past 35 years have had three tire punctures. The two I got 20 feet from my drive way, the other was on the interstate. Was able to pull over safely, but changing a tire in 90+ degrees with traffic wizzing by at 75+ MPH, not so lucky. Too bad I wasn’t a teenage girl in a bikini, I would have have three LEOs changing it for me!
They should use this experience as a cardiac stress test. Much more effective than the treadmill. Results are binary, you either pass or….
Had a chance to look closer. Both lines failed at the crimp between the hard and flex sections. Both look fine externally. The parking brake has always been marginal as mustangman pointed out. It barely brought us to a stop after I shifted to neutral. And just before cresting the hill down to a highway where cross traffic does not stop. Perfectly good pair of underwear ruined
Better to be lucky, my ‘83 GTI’s timing belt let go as I was pulling into my driveway. And it was supposed to be an interference engine. I replaced it, drove it for several years more without a problem.
More recently my 2011 MKZ hybrid’s 12v battery died in the garage. I had just come back from a trip to the boonies of southern Arkansas…
I know the guy who designed the drum parking brake. He and the truck brake engineer blame the flexing in the axles for wearing out the shoes requiring constant adjustment. That is the kind of wear I see on my truck
Just the last couple of days, good and bad. I myself consider that I have had four brushes with death, some closer than others so I am thankful every day. Son and wife are in Lisbon and very near the crash of the funicular that killed 20. We got a text right away saying they missed it buT not sure if anyone in their medical group was killed or injured. Then I got a call to pick up the neighbor lady at the dentist whose car had broken down. Today shop think the cvt trans is shot, but good there is still a warranty left.
Then after picking wife up from her pt session I pulled in and my garage door wouldn’t open. Just put a new opener and sorings in last week so thought the programming got screwed up. Good news had a house key in the car just in case. Bad news the power was out for the fourth time in a month. Good news came on again in a couple hours. Went to heat up some soup for the wife on the gas grill but the tank finally went dry. Good news, gotta spare tank. So went to just cut the grass while the power was out, and the mower was stumbling a little. I think the fuel pump needs replacing but good news I have a couple in stock. Just need some time and light to do it. Yeah and it started raining but finished in the rain.
I’m seriously thinking of a jackery battery back up big enough to handle a load for a while. With the legislation forcing wind and solar, the power is becoming much less reliable.
So all in all I’m not complaining and feel very fortunate for the end result. Just a word of caution to think about contingencies and take steps to be prepared. Had we not had a house key, we’d be sitting in th3 car for a couple hours. had I not lubed the dead bolts every six months, the key maybe wouldn’t have worked. Of course I have a lock box too. And I’ve been on a funicular and cable car far above the ground but didn’t enjoy it. But I’m lucky.
Interesting example of design choices made in one area affecting something else. I always knew they stunk but never the reason they needed such frequent adjustment. I wanted to think it was cable stretch or some other reason but this makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that tidbit of insight! BTW- the automatic adjustment mechanism won’t win any awards for function either
Sage advice. In any new to me car, I practice using the parking brake to slow the vehicle down in the event of an emergency. That helped here to reduce the time to respond and keep us from going down the bigger hill…
Even the most hard-core drum brake lovers admit that!
I had a 1/2 ton and a 3/4 ton Suburban, each with rear drums. I manually adjusted them every oil change and tire rotation. If I didn’t, the take-up distance caused a scary delay in braking if I spiked the pedal in an emergency. You would get a hard pedal and moments (too many moments) later the pedal would move and the truck would begin slowing. The cause was trying to instantaneously push a 20 foot long column of brake fluid down a 1/8 inch hole inside a 3/16s brake line to 2 wheel cylinders. Waaay to much resistance.
It could create some brown upholstery moments, especially when towing!
Flexing axles? Aren’t axles made of a very hard steel? I did have an axle break, you could see the void in the metal where it snapped. The car was built in 1949, perhaps quality control was not as good.
+1
Our '66 Galaxie 500 had self-adjusting brakes, and I made sure to do a couple of moderate-speed backups every month or so, but that wasn’t always sufficient to keep those drum brakes in good adjustment. So, when I would take it in for an oil change, I would have our indy mechanic adjust them manually. That was how I found out that the slot in the brake backing plate for the right front wheel didn’t line up properly with the adjustment mechanism.
Rudy, our cherished mechanic, used to swear a lot when he had to adjust that right front brake.
Axles have to be both high strength and flexible. It’s better to flex under heavy load. The alternative is a brittle steel that would break instead of flexing.
A high carbon steel like 1040 or 1050 could be prone to carbon segregation during solidification of the ingot, leading to clinkers on the centerline of the bar used to make the axle. Another source of the centerline clinker in your axle is inclusions formed while removing oxygen from the steel. All medium and high carbon steels remove oxygen by adding silicon and aluminum to tie up the oxygen. The hope is that the inclusions float out during solidification, but sometimes the big ones don’t.
Used an older Ford small pickup at work. Tried to stop at a stop sign, felt like I was going faster instead of slowing down, luckily no one in the intersection, and limped to the garage. Another time bud going to get married couple hundred miles away. His car broke So I decided I could take him. Snowing like crazy but trying to rush it in my 68 Cougar XR7 . Wide rear tires, spun out and did 3 360’s on a 2 lane highway, got control and did not go over 35, luckily no oncoming traffic. Stayed on the road, lucky me!
Pushing the brake pedal reasonably hard before driving should be common practice.
A 3000 pound boat trailer would do well to have trailer brakes with most tow vehicles. If the trailer is more than half the weight of the tow vehicle you really should have trailer brakes, or drive extra slowly. You shouldn’t drive in normal traffic at normal speeds with that configuration.
I would say that, around here, you see very few people towing with inadequate vehicles. Even the college bound crowd with their u-hauls have larger SUVs or big trucks. At any rate, as far as my truck it’s legal and more than capable. I have a glass bass boat that weighs more than the new one (probably closer to 2800 lbs loaded) and had a few idiots cause emergency braking and it handles that fine.
