Pac Brake not moving

[Richard And Babs Ames]

You may want to lubricate the plunger shaft as the WD40 is more of a drying and cleaning  agent and not a lubricant. Pac Brake should have a reccomendation. Sounds like a great price for the rotors.

[Larry and Heidi Lee]

Hey Richard, Pac Brake does advise lubrication on the cylinder mechanism but the part that stuck was the electric air switch solenoid that feeds air to the cylinder. This electrical DC part should not be lubricated in my opinion. The original owners of this coach were from Florida and I found what appeared to be white salt deposits on the switch shaft probably from sitting and lack of use.

[Richard And Babs Ames]

HilarLee I have seen a special high temperature  lubricant reccomendation for the cylinder if one is used as the the wrong lubrication may do more harm than good.

[David Rudisill]

Our Pacbrake failed recently. Same symptoms: the "exhaust brake" light illuminates, but the brake does not engage. Cummins in Medford, OR took it apart and found that the butterfly rod was bent and there was soot jamming it. They cleaned it up and straightened the rod, but it failed again after it got hot.

BTW, an easy way to tell whether it is working is to watch the turbo boost on your Aladdin system. When the Pacbrake engages, the boost will drop to 0.0-0.3. If you don't see that drop, it isn't working.

I called Pacbrake. They gave had me read the number off the tag on the brake, then gave me the part number for the new (PRXB) brake for our engine. They said that list price is $769.60, and they gave me contact information for several retailers in the area. Here are the prices I got:

Cummins in Medford: "about $1,500"
Freightliner in Redding, CA: $876
J & H Performance Diesel in Redding: $770
Henderson's Line-up in Grants Pass, OR: $710
CLF Warehouse in West Sacramento, CA: $615.68

CLF had it dropped shipped from Pacbrake's Seattle warehouse on Friday, and it arrived here in Dunsmuir CA on Tuesday. Shipping was $9.50. OTOH, sales tax was over $50.

I have an appointment at a local truck repair shop to have it installed this afternoon. It should take well under an hour.

Hope that helps.

--
Dave Rudisill
2004 Monterey (Cummins 350)

[Richard And Babs Ames]

David, Please let us know if can tell the "higher preformance" PXBR is better than the old one.

[David Rudisill]

David, Please let us know if can tell the "higher preformance" PXBR is better than the old one.

I just returned from having it installed. The truck repair shop is almost 2,000' further up the mountain than where we are parked, so I got to use it quite a bit.

We weren't hauling the toad, but I didn't notice any difference in performance with the new Pacbrake. A definitive test will have to wait until we head further south in a week or two.

[David Rudisill]

We had an opportunity to test the new PRXB yesterday. We descended from 2,200' to almost sea level, then drove through quite few hills to get to our current location, at 2,500'. We had one two mile 6% down grade along the way.

The PRXB definitely performs better than the original Pacbrake. On the 6% grade, it held us at 55 MPH in fourth gear with only occasional light use of the service brakes. With the old Pacbrake, I needed to keep it in third gear, below 52 MPH, using the service brakes more aggressively because we had so little braking assist from it in fourth gear.