Montana Brakes

[ken]

Just returned from a trip from the Goshen area and found that my emergency pin had been pulled and nothing slowed me down traveling. Then I noticed that my brakes were not stopping the Montana like they used to. I had to use the allison transmission coming thru the west virginia mts, OK GMC. Not a good feeling. Its going into the shop next week to see what happened. Has that ever happened to anyone else?

[bsmeaton]

Ken,

That's what happened to me, only the Ford brake controller picked up the problem and started alarming. I had no brakes at all when I tested them.

Ended up finding the problem myself (roadside). Several things found wrong - The brakes have a dedicated 2 conductor cable from the pin box to the street side axle wires. In the pin junction box, all grounds (white) were wrapped into one wire nut, and the smaller ones were barely touching. Fixed that, then found a wire that pulled out of the crimped connector where they connect to the rear axle (above the belly). This one was shorting out on the frame.

Hopefully with total failure they can find it pretty easily. It's the intermittent problems that drive you crazy.

[richfaa]

quote:Originally posted by bsmeaton

Ken,

That's what happened to me, only the Ford brake controller picked up the problem and started alarming. I had no brakes at all when I tested them.

Ended up finding the problem myself (roadside). Several things found wrong - The brakes have a dedicated 2 conductor cable from the pin box to the street side axle wires. In the pin junction box, all grounds (white) were wrapped into one wire nut, and the smaller ones were barely touching. Fixed that, then found a wire that pulled out of the crimped connector where they connect to the rear axle (above the belly). This one was shorting out on the frame.

Hopefully with total failure they can find it pretty easily. It's the intermittent problems that drive you crazy.

Brad..what alarm was the Ford controller giving you???

[bsmeaton]

Rich, I would get a continuous "trailer disconnected" with an intermittent "trailer fault". I believe disconnected is when the wire came out of the crimp and fault is when it would short to ground against the frame. The alarms show up on the message center in the dashboard, along with an annoying tone.

By the way, I used a test light to start tracking down the problem. The test light can be misleading as it is enough of a circuit for the brake controller to think everything is fine. Remove the test light, and your original problem shows back up as "trailer disconnected". Drove me crazy for a while until I figured out what was going on.

[JH Sechelt]

I can relate to you Brad, Ours drove me nuts until I figured it out, was sort of cool the way the truck told you, you had a problem before it was too late.

J&D