Ah, the forgotten 2012 6.7 Power Stroke F350 single cab. I bought this truck with high hopes to build an epic 6.7 race truck, but soon after the purchase, it was parked in the shop and long forgotten about. Months and months later, here we are finally starting to mess with the red single cab. Oh, sweet baby. So let’s address the elephant in the room really quick. We’re not going to make this a talking video; we’re gonna make this a doing something video.
Recently in my past video, if you guys watched it, I bought a Duramax 2018 L5P. Now, I’ve been driving that truck for a long time—months, months, and months. I guess not that long; I guess a long time would be years. So take that back, rewind. I’ve been driving it for months. The 2012 here, 6.7, with a simple stage one—just a simple stage one, that’s two parts: a tune and an exhaust. It drives a million times better than the old L5P over there in its stock form. I know the L5P has tons of potential, but the drivability of this truck here is night and day better than the black Duramax. I’m pointing that way because the Duramax is parked over there. Stage one, shameless plug, link in description.
But anyways, let’s cut to the chase here. I got plastic; it’s blown, so if you hear something weird, it’s the plastic. The truck has been sitting for a while and it’s been neglected by me just because—I mean, yeah, I lent it out. JB, you guys know JB if you follow the channel. He’s been on the videos a bunch. I lent it out to JB; he wanted to do some stuff with the truck and he ran it so hard that he ran through the backing plate on the inside brake pad. So the pistons in the caliper were hitting against the rotor, and it exploded the brake caliper because it got so hot. You would think that he would hear that or something grinding and stop. Nope, he said he didn’t hear nothing, just kept on going.
So here we are today, trying to get this—the red single cab back in drivability action. We gotta tear apart this caliper, see what the heck’s going on, and then get this thing out of the shop. It’s been in here for a long time; he’s the only one who’s driven it in the past 7 months, six, six months. So at first glance in here, oh, it’s cooked. Let me bring the camera in; I’m going to do a little overlay action with the phone. Here, you see that? That is the inner brake pad backing plate completely gone, and it’s puking brake fluid. Pulled the wheel, and we got nothing but brake fluid inside the wheel. I mean, there’s no brakes.
Getting it to this point, ’cause it was parked over there where the Duramax is, was very sketchy in terms of no brakes, and I almost crashed it. But here we are. So I hit the banjo bolt with some PB. I hope that can come out. If that can come out, we should be in good shape because it’s a little crusty, but it’s not terrible. We should be able to get this all apart and have no issues. So, brake job. Oh, they’re tight. They are tight. Jeez, oh man. I don’t want to strip those, ’cause then our whole progress will be ruined. Yeah, we’re getting her out. See if we can do this on the bottom side. Okay, oh baby.
Oh my, I’m not going to lie. I’ve honestly never seen that. So what happened was the pistons exploded. We’re going to go dual cam with the phone. So he did it in real good. Look at that. That’s real nice inside of the rotor. Trashed. There’s the backing plate. I mean, he didn’t go through the backing plate, but it was almost through the backing plate. Like, holy smokes, the backing plate kind of exploded too. So here’s part of the pistons to hit against the pad. There they are, and then those just kind of—I’m not even sure what happened to those, but they’re nasty. Oh, that’s dumb. I’m dumping just brake fluid—the whole what’s left in here right out. That was real dumb. Pretty crazy. Oh well. The outer pad looked good. I wonder if the slide pins were seized because the inner pad was cooked, and the outer pad still has life all over it. I’m dumping brake fluid just all over everything. Perfect.
Alright, so welcome to day two on the total brake failure on the F350 here. So late last night, I was, you know, just getting tidied up here, and I was having trouble bleeding the brakes or whatever. You know, you probably need them to be good. So I decided to go ahead and replace the driver side caliper as well. We’re just throwing parts at the thing, you know. You guys do that—throw parts at it and it doesn’t get fixed. So what’s happening is the brake pedal will pressurize, it’ll firm up, and then you keep your pressure on it—it’ll slowly go to the floor.
That could be a handful of things if you guys have ever dealt with some brake issues. One being it still has air in the lines, bad fluid, or you could have a bad master cylinder, or you could have a bad ABS module cylinder thing—whatever the technical term. But the one thing that we’re going to cross off the list is bad fluid with air in the lines because the fluid’s still coming out dark, like rusty. So I think JB absolutely cooked the fluid ’cause it’s coming out and it looks like beer. It has a yellow, very yellow, dark brownish rust color to it. So the fluid’s probably cooked. I ran one bottle through, and it’s not coming out clear.
So what we’re going to do is—I got this fancy thing. Hold on, let me show you. So, with me being here by myself, I decided to get one of the air bleeders from Harbor Freight. I got a couple of big brake jobs coming up soon, so why not—might as well get one. Now, this has a reservoir that you put on top of the brake master cylinder reservoir, and you fill this, and then you can just suck it all out until it starts coming out clear. So I’m going to start on the driver’s side. We’re going to get this thing hopefully sucked out, get some clear fluid in there, and then regroup.
Alright, so what this is, real quick—this is just the can right out of the box, you know, right out of there to here. Hook up your airline. This hooks to the bleeder. You crack this valve slightly to pull air, sucking out of here, and then you crack your bleeder open, and it’ll draw all that into the tank here. So this is very straightforward. We’re going to put that on the bleeder, we’re going to open this slightly, and we’re going to open this bleeder, and it is pulling fluid. We’re going to pull all this air out of here, and we’re going to see what happens. So I don’t know how long this is going to take. I’m going to check the—uh, I got her tight. Let’s check the res. We’re still full.
Alright, so I pulled a whole jug through there. I hooked up the jug to the top reservoir. Here’s what it’s doing. I’ll show you real quick. Hold on. So normal brake, as soon as you keep pressure on it, watch my foot—slowly go to the floor, which is most likely the master cylinder. I was just hoping to grasp at some straws that we could get rid of that old fluid and it would fix that, but, you know, most likely it’s the master cylinder. I’m going to check the rear brakes just to make sure they’re all okay, like the slide pins and stuff are good. There are a couple of ways to test it, but we’ll probably just start throwing some more parts at it.
I am going to try one little trick. An old guy told me to get in it, drive it, hit the brakes on like gravel or something hard, and get the ABS system to activate, and maybe it could bleed out some air. I don’t have a scan tool with the shop right now that can do an ABS bleed, which it might need an ABS bleed. So we’re going to try to go activate the brake and see what happens.
Alright, so as suspected, the rear calipers are actually in great shape. There’s a lot of pad left, all the slide pins are moving freely, and I just sucked the brake fluid out of the rear calipers with the new unit here. So you can see how dirty the fluid was. Basically, I just pulled it until it started turning clear, which is pretty straightforward. A lot of the dirty fluid was back here, obviously, it was at the rear of the lines. Sucked all that out, and we should be good. But I just hit the brake pedal, and it’s doing the firm to soft—so, master cylinder. I’ll tell you what, this thing is pretty nice. We gotta do all the brake lines on the old Chevy single cab out there. We’re going to finally get that thing together, and this will be perfect for that.
So that’s what I was figuring, but we couldn’t go through all that and not check the rear. Alright, so I’m going to get these tires put on, then we’re going to drive it. We’ll just—we’ll deal with this later.
Alright, so we were at total brake failure. Oh, they feel good right now. They feel real good.
That’s what he was pulling—blew the brakes out. JB didn’t hit the brakes yet. Hopefully, we got them. They feel great. Huh. Wow, I miss driving this truck. Oh, they feel awesome. I don’t know what more you could ask for. Maybe the master cylinder’s on its way out. I mean, that felt great, but they feel awesome. Feel like new brakes. $400 later with the purchase of that brake bleeder deal. I know I’m going to get roasted about the seat belt—let me put it on.
Alright, so here I got my foot constantly on the brake pedal. It hasn’t moved. We have not moved on the brake pedal. I mean, come on, did it fix itself? You know, the greatest fix is when it just fixes itself. Full brake pedal, we got full brake pedal—no soft, no sponge. I mean, I’m sitting there with my foot on the brake; it’s not going down. Wow, I missed this truck. It’s unbelievable how these run. I didn’t even lock up the brakes and activate the ABS. I got no ABS light on. That check engine light’s because a temp sensor in the mirror is bad. So maybe pulling out the bad fluid out of the rear helped. Was that the problem? DIY garage—I’m going to take that as a clear victory and a self-heal.
If I were to bet money, I would bet that the master cylinder is starting to go bad, but it feels good today. I mean, I got no sponge. I’m hitting the brake as hard as I want, and I got zero issues, zero problems. I mean, I’m on the brake pedal, and it’s not going down. I’m happy with it. We’re calling it good for now. Full brake overhaul done.
Alright, tuck this GoPro off, get back to the shop. Alright, well, we made it back. We’re going to look at the parts list used today and yesterday. So what we ended up doing is two calipers, driver side, passenger side, new rotors, new pads, new brake fluid, and I bought that brake bleeder. So, you know, we had about 30-something bucks in fluid. Calipers after core—so I took the cores back already—they were 56.45 a piece for each caliper. Did I say caliper? The calipers were 56.45 a pop, pads 19.71, and the rotors were 120 and 28 cents. So, grand total in parts for the total brake failure redo here: $313.16. And then the brake bleeder thing was like 105 after tax, so $418.16 is what we had to spend today at Top Garage on the single cab F350.
Now, this is through our commercial account at Advance. If you don’t have an account, you’d be probably 10% and some more than that roughly, but I don’t know what kind of discount you have or you don’t have. But that’s what I paid for everything on the truck today. That truck right there, the 2012 6.7 Power Stroke, drives night and day better than my new 2018—new used 2018—Duramax. Now, I know that there’s a lot of potential with the L5Ps. In stock form, it’s trash. No, I’m going to be straight. It’s terrible. It’s like it’s trying to breathe through a straw; it doesn’t want to get out of its own way. Feels goofy on the road.
That single cab drives night and day literally better with just a stage one kit. So that’s an exhaust and a tune on an 11 to 14 6.7 Power Stroke. Drives so good—anyone who has one will agree. But you will have probably turbo issues sooner or later, but man, when they run, they run good in terms of daily driving. So I did a couple of quick brake stops and brake punches and stops at the stop sign, hard on the brake, kept it on the pedal—feels fine. Probably should do a master cylinder sometime in the future, just based off of the tests that we were getting inside the shop here. But for right now, that’s how she’s staying, and I’m going to drive it.
So thank you for tuning in today with me on this awkward ending of the video. We are trying to get it together, so no more projects in the shop until we get it cleaned out. It’s completely overrun with junk and garbage, and we gotta get it going. So over there is a new Benpak base plate lift. We gotta get that thing in, so no more projects until this is installed. So you can see how it just fits, and that’s the low side of the garage, how it slopes down. We’re going to put it where the old Chevy is over there, so we’re going to lose our paint booth, and it’s going to go over there. We’re going to get rid of the dust extractor, and it’s going to be—that’s going to be the two-post over there. But as you can see, we got junk, junk, junk, junk everywhere, and we gotta get it cleaned out.
We’re gonna do—we gotta cut up the floor, do some footers for that because the floor here—it’s like 4 in, 2 in, 1 in, can’t deal with that. So we’re going to do 4×4 squares, 13-14 inches deep, I don’t know, maybe, where the posts are going to sit. It’s been cold and hot, so it’s a little musty in here. Got some fans going to try to get it blown out ’cause it stinks. Cobwebs everywhere, spiders falling on you. But comment below—would you guys want to see a shop makeover video? I was debating on doing that, but everything’s content, right? No? Maybe?
We gotta find a place for that dust extractor. That’s like out of a body shop. It’s like a legit one. I planned on doing a whole body shop division over there for paint and stuff ’cause I like painting and stuff, but I’m sick of working on the ground. We need to get that lift installed. Finally got a—I was too cheap to buy a new one, you know. Yeah, I know, cheap, cheapo me. So I found that used one right down on the road, a minute from here, and it’s time—lift, it’s time for the lift.
But alright, guys, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for watching me ramble at the end of this video. That was a complete brake overhaul in the 2012. All we did was two new calipers, new pads, new rotors, bled the brakes with the manual pump, and then opened the bleeder. And then that Harbor Freight bleeder for 99 bucks worked pretty good. Crappy old fluid sucked out of the rear probably was a huge part of the issue. So now we hopefully got some good fluid in there. I ran about three or four 32-ounce brake fluid bottles through there. Is that too much? I don’t know, but it feels good. But yeah, let me know if you guys want to see a shop overview overhaul video, and we’ll see you on the next one.
