Prepping for the Trip

Now that the house is in escrow, I need to get my vehicles I'll be using to haul our stuff in good working order. I've decided to make the first leg of the trip in my pickup truck pulling the small trailer. My reasoning is that if I do have a major breakdown at some point along the way, I can come up with another tow vehicle pretty easy and take the trailer the rest of the way with that. Then when I bring the big box truck, I can pick the pickup truck up using the vehicle trailer I just built.

Anyway, first order of business is brakes. I've had a pulsation in the brakes for some time now, but only under hard braking, which makes me think rears. I checked both fronts and rears with a dial indicator. Fronts were within a thousandth of an inch run out, but the backs were over ten thousandths, which is pretty extreme.

They look pretty new, which means that someone overheated them and then stopped the truck before the rotors could cool down evenly. I took them off and had the local Oreilly turn them down for me. It took a couple hours because they had a long queue of people turning rotors today, so I decided to put the new radiator hoses on the box truck while I was waiting.

A while back during a shakedown run I had the reservoir hose blow apart, which told me that the rest of the hoses aren't far behind. Luckily that little hose didn't drain the whole system before I could get the truck home and I only lost about a gallon of the six gallons that the system takes. Regardless, the upper and lower radiator hose were cheap, so I preemptively replaced them to make sure one of those don't blow next. I can take a heater hose or one of the cooling hoses for the air compressor and keep driving a short distance, but those big ones would cripple me immediately.

I got back to work on the brakes after replacing those hoses and reassembled everything, plus I did a tire rotation while I was at it. These lug nuts take 150 lb-ft of torque, which is the maximum my little torque wrench can do. It was quite the workout at the end of a long day using that wrench to torque down 32 lug nuts.

After that, I took it out for a test run and bedded in the brakes. No more pulsation and the truck stops really short now. I didn't realize how much braking power I was missing with the rear brakes not working right, but what a difference. I'm already feeling better about this trip.

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