I'm Having problems with the brakes on my car. Its an 89 GXL (No ABS) that I picked up as a shell this winter. It came to me with a leaking master cylinder... which I replaced with a reman unit from advance auto... the master cylinder was bench bled and installed. At that point the entire brake system was bled. After replacing that I got my engine in and took it for a test drive... the brake pedal had alot of travel and the car wouldn't start braking until the pedal was halfway down.. I figured it was because the pads were almost shot all the way around... I also had little to no e-brake either. That was back in January.
Now I've got some time off from college and I have been working on the car to get it finished, on the road, and ready to be inspected... and ready to autocross for next weekend.. I tried to change the pads and it turned out that I had 4 frozen calipers... So I got remans from advance for both fronts and both rears and threw them on with new pads... now my brakes are worse than before! There is no resistance until the last 2 inches of travel and then it is weak... the car barely wants to stop. The calipers were bled until no bubbles could be seen at all... What's up with that? Is there a chance that there could be air trapped some where in the lines or that the remanufactured master cylinder is bad? I can pump the brake pedal up while the car is off and it will hold pressure... but not while the car is on... could the booster be bad? It gets vacuum. Any advice for me or should I just keep bleeding the system to try to get any air that could be trapped in there out? Give me any suggestions that you have... I need to get this fixed asap!

Now heres my new car.... its all stock except for the hood and the borla cat-back.. its ready for "E-stock" once I get the brakes sorted out... For give the dirt and the missing FTP... It started to rain when I was driving home after washing it and then it snowed so I haven't had a chance to get back to the car wash...

 

sounds like air in the system still,
if you have a leak, the brake pedal will go down slowly all the way to the bottom.

get a bleed valve brake pressue guage (dunno how much it is) and screw it on the bleeder guage and have your friend/spouse/ex apply the brake and check the psi, should in thousands of lbs (anyone know the correct figure?

also try gravity bleeding one line at a time.

clean your pads and rotor with brake cleaner (DONT INHALE) or power wash,
how about your pads? too hard?

 

Or you could take it to a shop because you were so damn tired of trying to bleed your brakes like I did. It cost me $50 to get them bled I believe, maybe cheaper.

 

Thats the next plan... Spring break is over on sunday and I go back to school.. so if I don't fix it by then it goes to the shop and they can deal with it.

 

With air in the system the pedal should feel like a sponge--kind of bouncy--because you are compressing the air when you press on the pedal. If you have a hard pedal, even though there seems to be a bit more travel than you expect, air in the system is not likely to be the problem. The Factory Service Manual has a simple procedure for testing the brake booster. Give that a try before you take the car to a shop.