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horribly worn rotor

The truck that I bought had a problem of jerking hard to the right when you applied the brakes.  The common cause of this is unequal braking, where you have more brake grip on the side it pulls to.  Investigating further, I noticed that the rotor on the drivers side was worn.   I went tot kragen and bought new rotors, calipers and pads.  But it gets worse, trying to install I noticed that the brake hoses were not the same and they would not fit on the new calipers.  It  turns out that one is from an explorer and the other I dont know.  I also noticed that one of them was too short to be installed correctly, and mounted to the frame, probably as a result of the 8 inch lift that was installed, and the other had a nick in the steel braid that was surrounding the hose.  With this in mind I decided  to replace both of them.  After waiting for a few days I finally had the brake hoses, installed them and finished the caliper install and now I have doubled my braking power – to two working brakes.

I am now working on the rear, the problem is that he upgraded the axles from the stock 1/2 ton blazer axles to the 3/4 ton suburban axles.  This is a good thing, however it makes ordering parts difficult.  After spending a couple hours at kragen trying to get the correct parts, we thought we had it and it turns out that I have slightly too small pads.  So they ordered what they think is the correct ones, along with a rebuild kit for the rest of it, and I have to wait a few more days until that is available.

The rear axle is a dana 60 with a full floating axle.  This means that to take off the rear drum you have to remove the axle, which is not  that difficult although I did not have the proper tool (its like a soda can sized socket), fortunately kragen did.  So now its just a matter of trying to get the correct brake parts to rebuild this.  I am afraid of the brake system on this truck, the “mechanic” that I bought it from did not seem to care much about brakes, as a result I would rather spend a little bit extra and replace as much as possible and be able to stop than drive off a cliff.