Has anyone changed their own brakes?

The big thing in doing the rears is weather or not you have to pull the drum with the hub after pulling the half shaft or if the drum is like a cars where the hub can stay on the motorhome. if you have to pull the hubs, its also a good idea to replace the axle shaft seal as well too.

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Replacing the brakes is not the same as doing a brake job.

If you do them yourself, best check and double check the brake lines also. They probably should also be replaced. Better safe than sorry.

Biggest problem is that the newer calipers (and that goes back to at least my '91 Ranger) have phenolic pistons to insulate the fluid from the heat of the pads. I don't know what goes wrong, but eventually the pistons began to seize when they get hot. When the brake cools off the brakes work normal till they get a little overheated then they start dragging again. This happened to me on the Ranger twice, both times in Atlanta freeway stop and go traffic. I got off at an exit, pulled the wheel, let it cool for an hour or so, used the lug wrench to wiggle the caliper so the pistons would retract and it worked fine after that (but I replaced the calipers when I got home).

Same thing again, on a co-workers '04 Ram 3500 dualie. He replaced the hot caliper and we bled fluid thru the entire system till we were getting out fresh fluid. A few days later he was headed to Florida when it happened again with the other rear wheel, not far from my house. I picked up another caliper, we changed it out and bled the brakes. Both rotors need changing, as one has heat cracking. This is a low use truck but he will get to it soon.

Moral, go ahead and replace the calipers.

Charles

The best I remember is they have removably drums off the hub on the rear. Could have disc also. Frt. pads when you removed them, before removing bolts take two big screw drivers and force them between the rotor and inside pad to get a little play. Remove the caliper and take the outside pad out leaving the inside. Get a 6 in clamp and put one end against the caliper and one side on the old pad and compress the piston completely in. Like Charles says it will be a 50/50 chance off having them stick at sometime. Would I take a chance, Yes. If the rear are drum I would rebuild the cylinders if they have high mileage. It's nothing to rebuild the calipers there is only an O-ring in them and the kits are cheap. If you have done a car it will only be just bigger parts.

On a chassis that old, if I planned on keeping it awhile, I would replace everything. Hoses, rotors, master cyl (cheap) calipers, slides, use Ford OEM slide grease. If the rear drum measures out, you can reuse it, but inspect for heat cracks.

Just had my rear brakes replaced - cost me about $300. They were OEM from 92 and pretty rusty and I suspect were a PIA to work with. As I get older I tend to avoid the stuff that requires patience/strength.

There are no drums on the E-SuperDuty chassis (which was renamed to the E450 a year or two later). It's disc brakes all around, with the parking brake being mounted on the drive shaft in a little housing bolted to the back of the transmission. Incidentally that means you can't rely on the parking brake when jacking up a rear wheel, as the differential will let the other wheel turn freely once one loses traction.

From what I've seen online, it's not an impossible job to do the brakes on them. The rear calipers use some sort of a split pin thingy rather than bolts to join them together, which apparently requires a little different fiddling to remove but isn't terrible once you know the trick. The fronts are more typical construction.

I've always paid someone to do the brake work for me. I'm pretty sure I could do it, and there are plenty of other chassis maintenance things I've done, but somehow just haven't cared to do it myself...maybe partly due to a bit of unnecessary fear about the sorts of problems a serious mistake could bring about, and partly because mucking about under vehicles gets less exciting as time marches on.

In general, the E series chassis isn't too challenging to work on. There are a few things for which access is less than ideal (e.g. upper front shock mounts, spark plugs, vacuum system for the heater controls....) but by and large things are reasonably accessible and repairable and don't need lots of special or extra heavy duty tools.

The split pin just take a blunt punch and drive them out. Now they have little places on their sides to hold them in so just take the punch and start one side out and then do the other and then drive them out.. They will go back in with a hammer on the end. This will do no damage to them.