Brake Job: May 2023
Bought this ’02 Winnie Journey in 2016 and since then have put 10’s of thousands of miles on it as a full timing RV’er. But I don’t come from a trucking family and I thought that the brakes were fine…if really hard to push when I wanted to e-brake (emergency brake). And it would take quite a bit of foot pressure to hold my position at a light or something. And I have the Exhaust Brake that I use extensively so it has only been in slow speed situations that I’d use the brake pedal much. Usually anticipating a stop I could feather the brakes strongly until I’d get to the sign or light. Did take some pressure from my foot so I tried to avoid e-braking situations. Since I seldom e-brake, maybe once a year, it didn’t seem to be a big deal, even with the difficult braking under normal circumstances. The rig now has 99,700 miles on it and I’ve been driving it this way since I bought it with 70,000 miles on it.
And then my friend drove my RV a short distance, (he has a Journey too but his was a ’01) and told me that the brakes were excessively hard. Not a normal but an abnormal hard. Like I said, I’m not a truck driver, I didn’t know. A couple of months later, I was driving through the southern edge of Las Vegas on my way to Pahrump while on the 5-6 lane high speed Blue Diamond highway and damned if a light didn’t suddenly go from yellow to red on me and I had to e-brake. Sure easy to tell that something wasn’t right that time since I’d been warned.
So a couple weeks later I left Pahrump and headed north stopping at a shop I’ve used before that I liked, Dave Schirrick Diesel Repair in Winnemucca Nevada. Last December I pulled into their lot on a Saturday without an appointment when my engine wouldn’t get me above 35 MPH. They got me in, thankfully. We all guessed it was a plugged Fuel/water separator and I was on my way with a new one back to normal in just a couple hours.
So we had a history and yesterday took it in for a list of work and checking the brakes was part of that list. I’d read a little about it and had them change the brake system’s air dryer canister which is a maintenance item, and they checked and did a few other things as well, like change the Allison tranni internal filters and ATF. When the tech got that done and went to testing the brakes, he quickly found something wrong with them. The fronts weren’t operating like they were supposed to. The rears were fine. But he ran out of time so I took it back in this morning (7 AM!).
And the tech had me operate the brakes several times while he was under there observing and he spotted the fact the fronts weren’t operating at all. Which explained why the brake pads looked unused. And then he went on a hunt for the problem.
It only took ~1.5 hours (@ $150/hr!) to find that a red air hose had a kink in it. So the front brakes weren’t getting any air at all. The hose is part of a bundle of coiled air hoses up in a small area between the wheels (at the front of the chassis of course and underneath the front of the RV). They were all coiled together but the red hose had been coiled so tightly there was a kink in it! Likely it had been that way since 2001 when the chassis was manufactured. And no one noticed. Grr.
To find the problem, first the drivers side wheel came off…
Then he crawled under there hunting for the cause of ‘air in’ but ‘no air out’ of the tubing.
And here it was. A nice kink with small leak. Not enough of a leak to cause anything other then losing air quickly after parking and shutting off the engine so easy to ignore but the kink shut down the front brakes for sure.
Here’s a view from the passenger side where the hoses were. No one in the shop seemed to know why they were so long to begin with but the tech put in the same amount of air hose he took out in case it was an engineering reason. Maybe it balanced the pressures front to back? Then he zip tied them together as a nice coil so they wouldn’t kink again.
And that was it. That was the extent of my brake problem that I didn’t know I had. Total cost was $600 or so. Other items on my list drove it to a total of $1400.
As I left the shop and got on the road, I could feel how easy it was to just press on the pedal and have the RV’s nose dive as the front brakes grabbed. It’s never done that for me since I bought the rig. Since they’ve been non-functional for decades, I should get 100K miles of use out of them easily as all the components for the front brakes have been unused or lightly used for so long.