You are certainly picking up on my line of thinking Not to mention that the bean-counters at Chrysler typically seem to make things cheaper and more economical as time moves on...

 

I'm looking at the posts and agree that if your master cylinder is good, it should work. However, if I were to hang out in your garage and chew the fat, I'd pull the wheels and run the Mark I eyeball over your calipers. Are the bleeder valves for sure at the top? They will bolt onto either side, but if you swap sides, or use two for the same side, you will NEVER get all the air out. I have fixed several problematic brake problems by just making sure the calipers are on the correct side. I also worked on an ambulance once that had two left side calipers. 30 minutes and the brakes were perfect.

 

Thanks for the input, guys.

Bleeders are indeed located at the top on both sides.

Definitely starting to feel inadequate about my brake tuning abilities.

Thinking I might just take it down to my local brake guy and let him power bleed the whole system. Maybe there is air up in some hard to remove location.

 

Going over the previous posts, I see you did your rear brakes. I got a job once where a shoe hold down had broken and the shoe slipped off it's actuator. You might want to pull the rear wheels and drums and check the rears again. The brakes on these trucks, except for the proportioning valve, are about as simple as it gets. Trust me, you do NOT want to work on the brakes on a Rolls Royce. (I won't ever again myself.) Before you dig the wallet out, just run the Mark I eyeball over the rears. You may find a hold down spring, slipped wheel cylinder piston or other little bitty issue that is sucking your pressure.

 

Sounds like a plan, ol' grouch. I'd much rather find and fix than spend. That's for sure. Much obliged.

 

I wouldn't be surprised hat when you finally get it lined out, it will be something simple. A piece of hardware that came loose, a weak seal in the master cylinder or something like that. If the master cylinder was rebuilt, it might be bad. I had one go to the floor but it would pump up. It would then slowly go back to the floor. It was on the car a total of 1 1/2 days. The next one worked great.

 

There was definitely still air in my lines.

Also ended up bypassing the factory rear ABS. I don't know. Maybe it was failing or someting.It did this kind of wierd pressure pulse when you were braking.

Everything seems fixed now. That big old pig can even skid with my 35" tires now if you want to.

The braking is finally getting pretty good but I was thinking about trying some 38" tires.. I can still do the 3rd gen front rotor/caliper swap but gonna need some 17" wheels for that and these 35" tires I have now got a little life still. .., and I guess maybe wheel cylinders from a 3500 in my rear drum brakes finally makes sense to sorta balance better bres in the front maybe.

 

3rd gen Rotor/Caliper swap? Could you expand on that please?

 

I can't speak from experience but I understand it may be possible to do this swap since I already swapped a 98.5-02 front D60 into my 1995 2500 truck. But I still need to get 17" rims or larger to clear the larger 3rd gen braake components. Here is a guy on Youtube showing himself supposedly doing it.

 

Ok, he says 2000 and up..... as it needs to be the rotors that will slide on, not the ones staked on from the back side.....