From the Jungle

Hi folks, Still up here in the Iron Range rainforest, a bit out of Lockhart River, Cape York.

I have been offline for a while, our internet connection (satellite NBN) had been pretty iffy, we managed to change provider, & then it died altogether. Turned out to be a combo of the dish cable being gnawed by a Giant White-tailed Rat plus a dying router. The climate is pretty hard on electronics & those rats are buggers. If you ever visit anywhere in the tropics & see coconuts laying around on the ground with largish holes in them, that'll be from these rats. They grow up to around 1kg, & have teeth that are reputedly strong & sharp enough to open dog food cans. They also seem to have a passion for getting under the bonnet of cars & gnawing electrical cables. Cars have been written off as a result. We have our Patrol bonnet left up any time the car is not in use, & have sprayed all the cables with WD40. So far so good. Hairspray is said to work, but WD40 was something we carry.

Anyway I digress. After a month offline, we now have a new router & a new provider, & an NBN tech visited to replace the gnawed cable (placed inside 'underground' conduit up on the roof to hopefully make it a bit less 'gnaw-worthy').

You may recall we had a rear drum brake issue on our Patrol. It squealed incessantly & got hot on the passenger side. Inspection had revealed that the original 16 year old brake shoe linings had pretty much reached their wear limit (after around 245,000kms), & regardless of the cause of the squealing I deemed them in need of replacement.

The dilemma was whether to do the job myself up here, with little mechanical backup if things went pear shaped with the hydraulics or to use the car as little as possible & hope it lasted out (with the drum adjustment backed off to reduce the squealing) until we leave the Cape to drive back to Vic next May.

Driving it using the brakes as little as possible was not a lot of fun, so I decided the job had to be done. Given that with my bad back I didn't want to have to do the job more than once I decided to replace all. Wheel cylinders, shoes & drums. Getting aftermarket springs proved impossible, only genuine Nissan were available, & because Nissan whilst willing to sell me most springs individually, would only sell me the most expensive spring ($25 each) in packs of 5 the cost just for springs was gong to be over $225 for the two wheels, so I decided to risk being unable to re-use the old springs. This proved to be a good choice as all springs were fine & re-used without problem.

All parts were bought online, & took around 4 to 6 weeks to accumulate. Bendix shoes, Bosch wheel cylinders, RDA drums, plus a Sidcrome flare nut spanner, a special small vise grip tool (grips nut on 3 sides) as backup should the flare nut spanner round off the brake line flare nut connection to the brake cylinders & finally an $80 vacuum bleeder from Repco & a pair of brake line clamps from Supercheap.

At this point I should add that I received advice from a number of friends, including those who told me I was crazy to do this job up here without the backup of proper mechanical services. The risk, they said, was in bleeding the brakes, with the strong possibility of corrosion on the the 16 year old master cylinder piston wrecking the seals & leaving me with a car with no brakes. One friend, who's thoughts on all things brakes is informed by his previous professional experience i did however value above all the rest. Pearcey, fellow forum member here (& on other forums) is the chap, & he both advised & reckoned I'd be right & I was. It was he who told me about the little '3 sided' 4" vise grips (I'd never seen them before). Thankfully they weren't needed, both flare nuts opened ok with the Sidcrome spanner (chosen after reading online tales of similar but cheaper brands causing more damage due to 'spreading' under load. Sidcrome were the only ones I found any recommendations for. Another piece of advice I read, & employed successfully, was when undoing the aluminium flare nuts .... not to just 'push', as this is more likely to round off the nut. Instead to start it off with a firm 'bump' from the heel of your hand. Admittedly I was a tad nervous about doing that .... but it worked perfectly on both wheels...... & I'm guessing that they had not been undone since the car was new given that it was still fitted with some very rusty original 'Akebono' wheel cylinders.

To avoid the (real) risk of damaging the master cylinder seal, Pearcey advised placing blocks of timber under the brake pedal to limit travel to half or less, rather than pushing it all the way to the floor. I thought that vacuum bleeding would be safer still............ and it would have been if the bloody brand new vacuum bleeder had been designed a little better! I could not understand why the fluid in the master cylinder was dropping so slowly & I continued to get bubbles in the bleed line from the bleed nipple. Eventually realising that the connection through the cap of the bleeder bottle (between internal & external tubing) wasn't screwed in, but instead was a 'push in' affair , reliant on a tiny o ring to provide the air seal. I'm guessing the bleeder had sat on a shelf somewhere in a Repco warehouse for too long & the o ring had lost it's sealing ability.

So I had to fall back onto the safe 'Pearcey suggested' blocks of wood under the brake pedal. With both wheels bled twice this way it all worked jus as it should have done with the bleeding bleeder, & all sorted within 10 to 15 minutes.

Couldn't have done the job without MrsTea's help & support. She did the getting under the car bits which saved my back, plus made the packed lunches & drinks required for what ended up being a 1.5 day job. We worked slow & carefully to avoid 'back complications' which had the potential to make finishing the job impossible.

Thanks to to Gary the head ranger at the Iron Range National Park who allowed me to use the workshop at the Ranger Station. Having a proper trolley jack, plus proper axle stands, as well as a flat shaded concrete floor made a huge difference. Thanks to to Ranger, Josh, who in a previous life qualified as a vehicle mechanic (so I learned when the brake bleeder didn't work). His confidence was a godsend - it was him who suggested that the bleeder & not the bleeder user was at fault, & came to assist with the conventional 'old school' bleeding process.

So brakes all now quiet & operational. Internet working as it should & another 8 or 9 months to look forward to up here. All good.

And once again - many thanks to Pearcey who's messages & phone calls helped enormously.

Ps. Cause of the brake squealing & hot hub turned out to be that the trailing shoe was not fully retracting - even though the wheel cylinder was - leaving a gap between the rear of shoe & the cylinder piston - wear I think, so both needed replacing.