Today was the first day with car jacks. Finally, I’m cooking with gas. No more trundling around the car with the jack from the trunk, only able to lift one wheel at a time. It’s fine if you’re doing small tasks, but for work like this, it was a hole in the head.
So I got her off the ground and secure, slope or not, you can push hard on it and it won’t budge. Love the tags on these.
First I started on the front calipers. The thinking was to squeeze all 
the brake fluid out of them both, and in pumping them back up, the proportioning valve would reset. In doing this, I also removed both calipers for a little cleanup. 
Hey, it was nice to do something without breaking it. I repeated the procedure a few times, noting the amount 
of fluid moved, and thought that was at least a good way to flush out the old fluid once I had things operating properly.
After that, it was time to test out the back brake to see if any fluid would flow. Nothing. Nadda. Zilch. That wasn’t particularly encouraging. The logic was there, but not the results. Cass happened to have her phone on today, so I called Mark, the guy who knows all, and got him at lunch. He’s got a soothing way about him, and he talked me off the ledge. “Just start working your way to the back” he says. Ok, fine… Well, there’s more to it than that, but I’m on the right track.
I was able to break loose the two brake lines on the master cylinder, that’s nice. A few pumps on the brake pedal and I’m reasonably confident the master cylinder is free of bubbles, but if not, I could at least remove it later without worrying about the lines. Then I broke loose the two lines leading from the T on the back axle.
Both came loose! Hurrah. That means I can snake the brake lines out the backing plate still attached to the wheel cylinders if need be. The bolt holding the T in place also came loose. Damn, I’m on a roll here now.
As you can guess, I’m just as leery of creating more problems trying to fix things as I am of being able to fix things once they are out given the rarity of parts here.
With both lines were off the back T, I dropped the end of the car to see if I could gravity bleed fluid out the line again, but no joy. Not a drip.
Sooner or later I’m going to have to attack the brake lines at the proportioning valve that has been sitting right next to a header collector (hot) for years. The pin in the front still pokes in and out when I step on the peddle, so it is still functioning at least. At least I hope.
See, what I think I have is a valve that is just stuck at this point. There are springs inside meant to center the valve, but the valve doesn’t have to do it’s job very often, only when you have a leak or a burst line, so they designed it to do that well, not spring back well.
That was about it for the day. A torrent of rain called the game, and we just started wrapping up. It was pushing 4 pm anyways.
Now, a few hours later, after some thought, I’ve come to conclude that all my efforts on the calipers merely flushed fluid back and forth, and did nothing to relieve the pressure in the front circuit. There is a banjo fitting on both calipers that has a sizable bolt I can most likely loosen to let some fluid out of the circuit (another idea from Mark).
The plan for the morning, whenever it starts, is to loosen the one on the drivers side. It has the shortest line, and I can position the caliper so that the banjo fitting remains elevated as I bleed off some fluid. The caliper itself won’t drain, and if any air does get into the system, I can squeeze the caliper with vice grips flushing the bubble right out to the master cylinder. Sounds easy. Bahahaha! We’ll see what the guy upstairs thinks about that.