Cool 1977 Mack RL600L - No Crank, No Start - Plus Many Other Repairs

hey guys welcome back got another cool old grain hauling truck in my shop this is a 1977 Mack our model it's an RL 600 L to be exact which I believe is the long hood version of our model and this thing is super clean so under the cab there is the max of torque 5-speed transmission that's the triple countershaft gearbox that Mack was famous for it's got an air ride cab which is good Camelback spring suspension and I believe yep those are the Mack top loader axles so this is one heavy-duty drivetrain I wonder if it even has steer axle brakes so it does have steer axle brakes but it's got the old wedge style brakes these things are a pain in the butt super clean underneath the hood so a turbocharged engine I'm not sure I think they were all turbocharged maybe the thermodyne was not turbocharged I'm not a not an expert about max pretty funky air cleaner setup on in here pretty cool and got the huge inline injection pump on it looks like the engine was REME and in 1984 so you can't read the tag there looks like the the mains are 20 over the rods are ten over and the liners have been bored 30 over so I'm pretty sure these max design engines all have dry sleeves another thing that's kind of odd about it it has an aluminum frame well the trucks here because it won't start and I think I know what's going on it's got a few other complaints I guess the coolant temperature gauge doesn't work so he's also getting oil out of the air dryer when it purchased and you had the air compressor replaced but he's still getting some oil out of this dryer so we're gonna replace the filter cartridge inside and hopefully the old one is just kind of packed up with oil now he also wants me to look into some of these oil leaks but I'm not sure we're gonna get very far with that I mean it's a it's an old truck and they're all notoriously bad oil leakers they really aren't any easy ones to fix so that's what it does just clicks this the solenoid just clicks and doesn't make contact so what I want to do right now is just make sure that we're getting enough current to the control wire so I got my little amp clamp hooked up there so we're just gonna watch the meter okay so 47 millivolts should equal 4700 milliamps so 4.7 amps on that control wire so yeah almost 5 amps should be way more than enough to energize that solenoid so I don't think we have a control problem we have a bad solenoid now let's see if it'll start I got my remote starter switch right here and I plugged it in about you know about 30 minutes ago wouldn't go first thing this morning but maybe now that it's warmed up it'll it'll actually go so if you don't like sparks you might want to look away so my dad actually installed these half fenders over the summer and he was almost positive they'd be ripped off by now but they look pretty good these guys used this truck for hauling grain in and out of the field and put that Camelback suspension you get a lot out of articulation so the fenders had to be kind of comically high off of the wheels in order to to not rub looks like the trailer rubs pretty good on top of the fenders but you know what are you gonna do so for my money I don't see any reason to do any further testing on the solenoid here we know that the control wire is capable of carrying 5 amps that should be plenty of current to to actuate the coil and we know that the the high current terminals there are capable of carrying enough current to to power up the solenoid on the starter we've confirmed that by jumping those with a screwdriver so that's it we don't have to go any further it needs a solenoid well I think I was wrong this is not a Mack Sedin it's a thermodyne at least according to that tag on top of the valve cover so I'm not sure what year they switched over from the thermodyne to the max design or if they they made them in parallel like I said it's 1977 so this is a little bit older than what I'm used to anyway I think I figured out why the water temperature gauge doesn't work pretty sure can you guys see it yeah back here behind this power steering reservoir is the coolant temperature sensor and the wires broken off of it well it's not a wire it's actually the old-style with the copper tube and the tube just broke off so I'll have to see if we can get one of those I don't know if they're universal or if it's kind of specific to this truck yes we'll want to dig it out of there and find out well it looks like somebody's already replaced the water temperature gauge with a an aftermarket gauge so maybe we should just do the same thing so there's that triple countershaft Mac transmission I don't really know of anybody else that did that they were kind of the only ones I mean you look at the size of this thing that thing is absolutely massive and it's only got five gears now this is not a twin stick truck that only has one lever a lot of the 5-speed Macs have two sticks and so you use the one stick for your low and reverse and then the other stick for your whatever other gears so it looks like the output shaft yoke there is leaking a little bit so we got a pretty good leak from the yoke going into the power divider there looks like maybe the actual power divider itself is leaking pretty good well he was also complaining about the brakes he said the brakes are not as strong as they used to be but the shoes look like they're brand new maybe a little bit more worn on the top than the bottom but yeah there's nothing wrong with that I thought maybe this truck would still have the old manual slack adjusters but looks like somebody has converted it over to automatics so that's a good thing I don't like the looks of this airline back here so this is one of those reusable style fittings but it looks like they've this is at the back of the truck they must have just backed it into some stuff and then this whole bracket is broken so it's just kind of bouncing around so we better take care of that we don't want this valve just bouncing around that's gonna rub through all these hoses you see most of them have already been replaced but it looks like this one's starting to get kind of chewed up too so we'll fix the bracket and we're probably got to make a new line there so a pretty old-school setup on the batteries here so it's got two batteries on this side hooked up in series so you see that's the positive and it's hooked up to the negative this is also the this is the positive terminal of the battery here so two on two in series on this side and two in series on the other side of the truck for total batteries but this is not a 24 volt system this is a 12-volt system these are 6 volt batteries so normally when they have 3 cells like this that's a 6 volt battery so the way it works you have two in series on this side giving you 12 volts two in series on the other side giving you 12 volts and then those are hooked up in parallel so go ahead and try to wrap your head around that anyway the result is that we have four batteries and it's a 12-volt system it just kind of some extra nonsense going on here so that's the gizmo right there it's a presto light solenoid 100 amps 3 wire and then this bottom plate is a ground so we'll see if we can match that up to something I don't know if it really needs to carry a hundred amps so all it does is turn on the the big solenoid right here on the starter so it's basically you know kind of like a relay powering a relay anyway there's some other electrical problems we're gonna have to fix so I see there's a piece of Esso cord here and although insulation is cracked and broken on that so we're gonna have to fix that I don't know why this a so cord does that so badly I see this all the time it gets to a certain age and then the insulation on the actual conductors just falls apart the outside insulation is pretty Hardy but this stuff on the inside is is not and I'll bet you that runs all the way to the back of the truck that's probably for the taillights anyway we got to fix that and then this terminal strip is broken he's all concerned about that I don't know what we're gonna do with that you know this is old school stuff before they had weather pack connectors and all this fancy new stuff this is the way they used to do it okay here's what I came up with for the starter solenoid it's a little bit different this is a four-post instead of a three post but it won't make any difference so the the extra terminal here is for the old school ignition system with the ballast resistor now like if you're familiar with the Delco ignition system they do this exact same thing but the solenoids built right onto the starter this is a kind of a separate style pretty much straight out of the Ford parts book then I just picked up a whole new mechanical water temperature gauge so we'll just swap out that whole unit and this one's black might match a little bit better than that silver one that they put in [Music] okay we're gonna go ahead and clean this up because I don't like that at all somebody added this inline fuse holder and they just tapped into the power here at the starter solenoid for it which is fine but I don't like that nasty looking terminal so we're gonna clean that up real quick [Applause] so recently I put out a video about replacing an alternator in a Toyota rav4 so in the process I put a little bit of dielectric grease on the output terminal of the alternator before I installed the charge wire and to my surprise I had multiple people comment that that is the wrong way to do it that in fact the dielectric grease is an insulator because dye means you know opposed to electricity and that the dielectric grease would in fact resist the flow of electricity through the connection and that the proper way to use dielectric grease is to apply it on top of the terminals after they've already been installed now I can tell you that I've put dielectric grease on the contact surfaces of thousands of electrical connections thousands and I have never ever ever ever had the dielectric grease cause resistance in the connection that is in fact a myth and there are multiple videos on YouTube debunking that myth but it seems to be pretty pervasive which again is kind of a shock to me but it's the Internet you never know what could happen now one of the cool things about having YouTube channel like I do is that I get to learn things from the comment section so a lot of smart people are watching my channel and a lot of those smart people have a lot of helpful tips for me so one of the things that I've learned from the comment section of my own channel that I did not know is that the dielectric part of dielectric grease doesn't actually come into effect under normal conditions for these types of connections we could use any kind of grease that we want it really doesn't make that much difference so where the dielectric part of the grease becomes important is when you have the possibility of arcing so in the event of an electric arc such as let's say we put this dielectric grease on the context of a big switch and now you have electric arcing causes a lot of heat and it causes the dielectric grease to burn so what's going to happen with the petroleum-based grease is that the grease will and will burn and because it's a hydrocarbon it will leave behind carbon which is conductive so it kind of has a high high resistance but it is in fact conductive and that causes problems so the reason that we use electric grease is because dielectric grease is silicon based and when it burns it does not leave behind conductive carbon so if you're one of these guys who believes that dielectric grease inhibits the flow of electricity through an electrical connection such as this I will put a link in the description to some articles and some videos that probably explain the phenomenon better than I can personally I like to be very thorough and put the dielectric grease on every layer of the connection that way you get the maximum kind of barrier against water and salt intrusion and I mean it's only going to do so much but at least it it helps for a while now another thing that works very well with any kind of electrical connection battery cables or or anything that you might think of is to use a rust preventive substance like this stable or fluid film it's kind of lanolin based and you just spray it on like so it makes a big gooey mess and eventually this will break down but event but it does do a very good job of protecting these terminals well I dropped my camera which that's not a new thing drop it all the time but this time she didn't wake up and I took it all apart looking for a loose connection a cable that popped off or something and I didn't find anything so there's a main a main light here that comes on when you turn it on but the processor won't won't turn on nothing on the screen no no noises no nothing so you guys are gonna have to suffer through with the GoPro for a little while until I can figure out a replacement for this thing which it needs to be replaced anyway you see I've melted the viewfinder with the torch one time and then there's so many artifacts on the lens here from welding and torching and pretty much destroying it and the GoPro makes everything looks so dark anyway I'm draining the coolant out and we're gonna go ahead and change that coolant temperature gauge so the the sending unit is back here behind this kind of behind this power steering reservoir and I was gonna try to do just kind of a hot swap and see if we could get away with not spilling too much coolant but they've got some kind of a pipe nipple and a bunch of a bunch of craziness going on there so I want to get that all apart and see what's going on okay so I got this little short pipe nipple here that's kind of stuck and I can't get on it with a pipe wrench so I'll show you a cool tool this thing right here is a it's a pipe nipple extractor so you can actually get these at Harbor Freight and they're pretty good you know it's not like something you use every day but when you need it you need it yeah baby come on it's like a fourth drop I've caught on camera on this video alright let's see if this works well the reason they had all those pipe nipples and all that garbage on there was because this old probe was pretty long but I think our new ones quite a bit shorter yeah see that would almost have gone so I think we're gonna be fine with the new one Oh why that thing is Church easy oh well I left a little curlicue a wire or of the descending tubing here hopefully that'll help kind of absorb any vibration that we might have and I'll just tie the rest of it up and should be good to go okay I think we're done looks pretty clean a lot better than having all those pipes and extra garbage hanging out there I did end up pulling this power steering reservoir off so I could get the access to the bolts for these loon clamps and go ahead and tuck that copper line in those loom clamps and then I don't know if you can see it but I installed a new grommet there too so we'll go ahead and button up the dash once we get all of the electrical figured out I don't want to do it now cuz he said the back lighting wasn't working so I want to make sure it's not a circuit problem so just make sure when you do this you got to start by feeding that that copper tube all the way through every single passage because you know it's it's permanently attached to the gauge doesn't come off oh man the light does not play well with this GoPro okay on the firewall here is a terminal strip actually there's two of them and they're plastic and this one is broken the customer doesn't like it he wants to replace it I offered to glue it which I think would be totally fine but he really didn't go for that idea he wants a new one Mac used these on a lot of different models so I think it's possible I could find a used one but my normal use truck parts source did not have one so here's what I came up with this is a new terminal strip from mcmaster-carr it's got the same number of circuits fourteen circuits but it's a double row a terminal strip and it's got roughly the same pitch between the terminals but it's a little bit closer so it's a little bit shorter but I think we can make it work and it looks like most of these you know ring terminals and stuff are pretty small so I think we'll be okay anyway I'm gonna carefully try to change over this first terminal strip and if that works out okay we're gonna do the other one too well it doesn't look too bad I guess I mean obviously it doesn't match the other one but I think it'll do the job and I think we'll just leave well enough alone and we'll leave that other terminal strip the way it is if he doesn't like it I can change it out later but we do need to do something about this that's that Esso accord the installations all all busted up on the conductor's here so I think what we're gonna do we'll just strip this jacket back a little bit see if the insulation is any better inside the jacket and if it is we'll just put some little pigtails on here and patch it up that way there's no slack in that cord so I can't pull any more wire out what is it pup yeah I know max gets very concerned when I started talking to the camera he thinks there's somebody in here he can come see just were you talking to myself pup that stuff is pretty crusty they should never use that cell cord for this I know I'm too opinionated about wiring but I just deal with so many electrical problems the wiring problems after a while you just get worn down okay yeah it looks pretty good so the conductor insulation is good underneath this jacket so we just need a splice on some some well short pieces here and we'll be we'll be good to go okay here's what I came up with so I just spliced onto the Esso cord with some little tails here and I'm gonna cover the whole splice with a big piece of shrink tube like this and we should be good to go I don't know if it's the UV light or what it is that destroys that that conductor insulation inside of this SLE cord but for whatever reason it just doesn't last very long so you're probably also headed for the comment box to write something nasty about how I made all the wires the same color in the truck roll that's pretty normal this truck seems to have on multiple multiple wire colors in the harness but normally on big trucks all the wires are black and they do everything with circuit numbers so I went ahead and and labeled these each with a number so we'll slap it back together and we should be good to go well I think it looks pretty good so I'll hose that down with some of that stable goo hook the batteries back up and make sure everything still works a good thing about this truck we don't have to worry about letting the smoke out of any computers or modules or anything like that okay and change this air dryer cartridge real quick and I did this once before on a video and a lot of guys asked me about this strap wrench that I'm using I think it's made by Lyle or sold by a while I will attempt to put a link in the description if I can find it works pretty good cat caterpillar also sells a really nice one it's one of the few things you can buy at a cat dealership that doesn't cost an absolute fortune hey man look at the run out on that thing a little rusty [Music] okay we need to make a new one of these yeah that'll work so we don't need a new bracket we just needed to drill a couple of new holes in the bracket what's wrong with that I think it'll work so that's what they should have done in the first place but instead they tried to I don't know this must have been the old bracket and they must have tried to just bend it up so they could put that that other bracket on there I'm not really sure what the reasoning was for that anyway I think that's gonna work just fine okay okay we got to replace this air hose it's looking pretty sad so I don't know if it's a common science we can just buy one off the shelf or if we need to make one these are reusable fittings but this one's looking kind of sad so we may not be able to reuse this one left hand thread come on guy yeah it's been a while it has been a while you know basically it it screws together and makes kind of like a crimp except that they can be reused so this one's in good shape we can reuse that one okay this one's not any good it's actually basically rubbed through right here so we're gonna need a new fitting so one new fitting and a new piece of hose and we'll be all set okay I've got a new hose made up and I did reuse the one old fitting and then I had to buy a one a new one so when it comes to this air brake stuff you can't mess around you have to buy the approved stuff so this is sae 100 r v hose which is a type of you know reinforced hose that's d-o-t approved for use with air brakes you also have to buy fittings that are DOD approved for use with air brakes technically speaking if you want to make hoses like crimp hoses together you'd have to be DoD approved for for assembling brake hoses which I doubt that anybody actually does but technically speaking I think you're supposed to be so there's a lot of risk associated with brake parts especially on these big trucks you know where I live farmers are allowed to gross eighty eight thousand pounds with these rigs and you don't want his truck you know flying out of control taking out a school bus full of kids because of some shoddy brake hose that you put together so you you kind of have to follow the rules okay I think we're done back here so this is our new hose that we installed yeah I got it all rounded up in the frame okay I do install one new loom clamp up here in the frame rail and it looks pretty good I don't think that can rub on anything so it should be good to go and I wanted to say to on these fittings these are - eight fittings but they're marked for both SAE and J I see so they're they're dual seat they have both a 37 degree and a 45 degree seat inside the fitting so they're compatible with you know either style and that hose they are proud of that stuff $12 a foot for that hose $18 for the fitting so it's like a six foot long hose I got over a hundred bucks so we better talk about oil leaks cousin always gonna ask me about that I'd say starting from back to front the the input shaft for the power divider that one's looking pretty good oh the output for the transmission that seems to leak pretty good and then the actual case of the transmission is leaking that one's gonna be really hard to fix and then it looks like either the oil pan or the rear cover of the engine is leaking pretty good the steering gear seems to leak pretty bad you got a nice puddle on the floor down there this is not something I'm familiar with this is some kind of a little bit different steering gear looks like maybe it's leaking right here I don't know where this is input shaft housing bolts up like I said I don't know that much about that unit the power steering pump reservoir leaks a little bit so over here on the right side of the truck we've got a number of engine oil leaks and it looks to me like the culprit is the tappet cover on the front of the engine there's two of them the back ones pretty easy to get to but the front one requires that the injection pump to be removed so that's a pretty major job to replace or to reseal that probably beyond the scope of where he wants to go looks like maybe there's a governor cover on the front there leaking a little bit too you guys can't see anything this GoPro is terrible and low light okay I think we're almost there I've done a few other small tasks kind of off-camera down here on the on the throttle linkage there was a cotter pin missing I replaced that up here on this little short jumper there was a hose clamp missing I replaced that there's a throttle return spring back here the end was broken off so I just kind of read bent the end of that and this one down here is kind of loose so we'll have to just see how that goes I don't know how important it is and I'm in the process of refilling the coolant which is no small task this this engine is air locked like crazy I only got about half the coup and when I first started pouring and if I would have known that was gonna happen I would have used my vacuum to suck it down but I didn't want to do that cuz I didn't think I had all the old coolant out anyway we're slowly getting it I may have to run it for a while to get the thermostat opened up and get that circulated around well I guess we'd better see if it's going to start always a fry cans on the camera but the back plates working oh good alternators not working so the temperature gauge is working but the alternator is dead not putting out anything I got the lights and the blower motor on hang on yeah something wrong there all right we'll see if the old girls got enough to used to go for a joyride there's no computers or anything like that so if we can get it started we'll be fine and I talked to the customer he said the alternators under a warranty it's only a few months old he bought it from a local auto electric shop that everybody buys from and he's gonna swap it out so I'll pull it off there for him and he can take care of that but we're mostly done with what we want to do for right now so the big thing I want to check he's still complaining about the brakes says he just doesn't have good brakes so I got a feeling that it's a bad treadle valve or foot valve which is the valve connected to the brake pedal I don't know that for sure so this thing's old-school it's got three knobs she's got to do yellow and blue to release the tractor brakes I haven't driven the manic 5-speed in a long long time so hopefully we don't wreck anything [Music] [Music] I love that Camelback dan such alarm delayed well that's weird now it's kind of charging well I bet they hit a certain rpm before the regulator turns on cuz I only read it up to about 1400 it's definitely working now okay pretty good shakedown I'm not sure about that treadle valve a lot to do some more troubleshooting with that alright guys I think that's it thanks for watching I am going to adjust the clutch and then maybe do a little bit more testing on that alternator and then we're gonna ship it out of here but I've got a feeling it's gonna be back to fix at least a few of those oil leaks so if that happens all I'll try to bring you guys along and this is a cool truck I'd like to have one of these myself I really wanted to be model Mac for a long time until I sat in one and it's just too tight I'm kind of a tall guy and I just I don't really fit in the B model but these are models are cool and I know where there is one it's newer than this but set up pretty similar all Mac drivetrain Mac engine transmission axles it's got Dayton style wheels but it's got a 12 speed Maxo torque transmission which would be a bonus so it's in really good shape but it needs a camshaft but I can't get the guy to sell it to me so we'll keep working on it maybe someday he'll come around

Channel: Watch Wes Work

Views: 358,168

Rating: 4.9157276 out of 5

Keywords: mack, mack truck, semi, truck, r model, r600, 5 speed, cool, old, 1977, coolant temperature, gauge, terminal strip, air dryer, air brakes, air hose, fitting, flare, hose, 100r5, bracket, install, solenoid, starter, amp, meter, no start, no crank, mechanic, repair, replace, fix, drive

Id: cWvpkEjcECs

Length: 40min 45sec (2445 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020