Air parking brake locked

[Oscar1]

WHEEL CHOCKS!!!
If you have a frozen brake and are too aggressive on the throttle trying to rock it you can do some damage. If frozen give it a try but easy! If you can determine which wheel is stuck a large hammer strike to the offending drum can help. Bus in neutral and WHEEL CHOCKS!
Get the safety hint here?
Good luck

Oscar

[Goingmerry]

Do y’all think the pictures attached could be my solenoid valves? They have 2 wires each running to them and each has a hose coming in and out of it. They are located in the dash and I can clearly see they are linked to the air brake release button. I am also trying to source a replacement wire for the one that was removed but would like to know if these are the solenoids that need to be bypassed in case I can’t get that to work.

[Jolly Roger bus 223]

havent read the entire thread but safety wise you never bypass anything safety/brake wise unless it is only to diagnose the problem and remove the jumper and reconnect the wiring until you figure it out.
no jumper left in place.

[Crown_Guy]

Originally Posted by Goingmerry

Thanks for all the help, I am now almost certain it is the sensor for the back lift door that got disconnected some how during demolition and then mistaken for a speaker wire when we stripped those. Should be easy enough to fix once I get a replacement wire I’ll just have to figure out which one of the plugs to plug it into above the front door.

And yes I hope someone else takes this as a warning on how easy it is to make stupid mistakes. Unfortunately I’m extra dumb because I did read up on lots of this prior to doing anything electrical and still pooped it. We were checking lights and following lines to be careful as we went and just from inexperience and perhaps a bit too much eagerness made this stupid mistake.

I can't resist jumping in here with my experiences with a VanHool Coach in commercial service I still drive for a friends' Charter Company. As most Coaches today are being MANDATED to have wheel chair access and equipment built in, all it does is makes simply using and conducting normal operations nearly impossible when a stupid sensor SOMEWHERE goes on the fritz.

This particular VanHool has a habit of not sensing the chair mechanism stowed and the door closed properly. The result was that it's impossible to release the parking brake (the same as this yellow air valve button), and put the coach into gear. It's a BITCH to get the damn thing figured out to isolate what sensor is causing it, all with passengers loaded and waiting to depart, and the customer getting pissed at the unmovable coach.

Needless to say I've worked up, a very well earned through very BAD experiences, a truly deep down LOATHING and active HATRED for all the add on, so called "SAFETY" SH*T they load up the newer buses of all kinds today. All it ever does is make them LESS SAFE and very dangerously unreliable in performing their most basic functions of being able to move passengers (and cargo), down the road in a controllable, simple Safe and Predictable manner.

This is the main reason I have no desire to ever learn to drive the new generation of Setra's, VanHool's or even Prevost's which have gone over to the dark side. I much prefer any older MCI but unfortunately here in KommiFornia they're doing all they can to drive any coach older than 2010 off the road by not letting them be registered by DMV. I've had friends in business be forced to unload perfectly great revenue generating MCI's merely because the Dictators in charge here deem he can't use it to make money anymore. These coaches are built for 20-30 years of commercial service and it's a true Crime to force a business to get rid of them while still in the prime years of their service life with many productive years left in them to run profitably. Truly a Crime.

This just doesn't sound like the USA I'm used to living in, where a soulless government can in effect steal a business owners means of production through unconstitutional Diktats. (Oh No! Covid! shut everything Down!!!)......Please don't get me started.

This poster has his hands full and will need to carefully find out about the wiring and sensors and interlocks and see they are ALL properly dealt with so he won't compromise the safe operation of his bus. It's literally worth his life and his family's life to find a properly trained and maybe even certified mechanic or shop to deal with this and restore it to a safe and reliable condition. By all means get rid of the wheelchair related crap if you can safely do it, but seek help and do it right. Unless you need the chair lift there should be no need to put up with the flakiness of random sensors that will override parking brakes and transmission functions like I have to with that VanHool.

Beware of the other common little "safety" add-on that forces the driver to get out of his seat and go to the back and push a button when you stop and shut the bus off. If you don't the interior lights start flashing and the horn starts honking and you can't stop it without re-starting the bus, or pushing the button within a certain time limit... This needs to be gone too.

I'm sure there's more lovely little land-mine gotcha's being added every day to the list of "Safety" systems that only make them less and less likely to ever be able to drive down the road at all.

Just my observations and 2 cents and worth exactly what you paid for it. But I've earned my cynicism the hard way and I'm not going to apologize for it. I'll just avoid at all costs the newer vehicles. I'm happier that way. Cheers.

[joeblack5]

Wow. That is a lot of anger. Be careful with your ❤️.. I have a bus just like that but just fixed the switch.
A little stress ones in a while keeps you on top.

Johan

[Deezl Smoke]

Originally Posted by Crown_Guy

I can't resist jumping in here with my experiences with a VanHool Coach in commercial service I still drive for a friends' Charter Company. As most Coaches today are being MANDATED to have wheel chair access and equipment built in, all it does is makes simply using and conducting normal operations nearly impossible when a stupid sensor SOMEWHERE goes on the fritz.

This particular VanHool has a habit of not sensing the chair mechanism stowed and the door closed properly. The result was that it's impossible to release the parking brake (the same as this yellow air valve button), and put the coach into gear. It's a BITCH to get the damn thing figured out to isolate what sensor is causing it, all with passengers loaded and waiting to depart, and the customer getting pissed at the unmovable coach.

Needless to say I've worked up, a very well earned through very BAD experiences, a truly deep down LOATHING and active HATRED for all the add on, so called "SAFETY" SH*T they load up the newer buses of all kinds today. All it ever does is make them LESS SAFE and very dangerously unreliable in performing their most basic functions of being able to move passengers (and cargo), down the road in a controllable, simple Safe and Predictable manner.

This is the main reason I have no desire to ever learn to drive the new generation of Setra's, VanHool's or even Prevost's which have gone over to the dark side. I much prefer any older MCI but unfortunately here in KommiFornia they're doing all they can to drive any coach older than 2010 off the road by not letting them be registered by DMV. I've had friends in business be forced to unload perfectly great revenue generating MCI's merely because the Dictators in charge here deem he can't use it to make money anymore. These coaches are built for 20-30 years of commercial service and it's a true Crime to force a business to get rid of them while still in the prime years of their service life with many productive years left in them to run profitably. Truly a Crime.

This just doesn't sound like the USA I'm used to living in, where a soulless government can in effect steal a business owners means of production through unconstitutional Diktats. (Oh No! Covid! shut everything Down!!!)......Please don't get me started.

This poster has his hands full and will need to carefully find out about the wiring and sensors and interlocks and see they are ALL properly dealt with so he won't compromise the safe operation of his bus. It's literally worth his life and his family's life to find a properly trained and maybe even certified mechanic or shop to deal with this and restore it to a safe and reliable condition. By all means get rid of the wheelchair related crap if you can safely do it, but seek help and do it right. Unless you need the chair lift there should be no need to put up with the flakiness of random sensors that will override parking brakes and transmission functions like I have to with that VanHool.

Beware of the other common little "safety" add-on that forces the driver to get out of his seat and go to the back and push a button when you stop and shut the bus off. If you don't the interior lights start flashing and the horn starts honking and you can't stop it without re-starting the bus, or pushing the button within a certain time limit... This needs to be gone too.

I'm sure there's more lovely little land-mine gotcha's being added every day to the list of "Safety" systems that only make them less and less likely to ever be able to drive down the road at all.

Just my observations and 2 cents and worth exactly what you paid for it. But I've earned my cynicism the hard way and I'm not going to apologize for it. I'll just avoid at all costs the newer vehicles. I'm happier that way. Cheers.

Very well said actually.



The intent was/is to make things safer, and every now and then that does happen. But for the most part, every new "mandated" safety device, emissions device, or other new improvement, just moves the accident to a new location, and often even creates two new accidents, just in a different location. Then off to fix those, and so on and so on etc., etc.



A good example of a successful "improvement" is the engine on flight 328. Had that happened 20 or 30 years ago, we'd be trucking in body bags instead of mal-informed media disciples.



Here on the farm, given the age of the owner and myself, we are comfortable running older equipment that we know a lot about. We bought a new tractor 15 years ago, and sold it a few years later as once the warranty was off and we had to pay the tech, the continuous codes that would stop operations became too much to handle. We could'nt read, replace or repair ourselves. We have to have a proprietary laptop come out and "fix" it. Eventually the true downtime costs were too much to bare, and so off to the next owner it went.

That said, some of those electronics "could" have saved the tractor from a complete component failure which "could" have been even higher costs. But that would only happen if the tractor would run long enough and the sensors were operating properly. Good luck with that.



So back to the more simple era of equipment we went. Now we have some component monitoring and safety devices, but if they fail, we can fix them with 14 gauge copper wire from the auto parts store. We can also continue operations until proper time to do the repair. Yes, operating like this does require a now extinct thought process known once upon a time as "common sense", but we still have some of that here. We have to be careful who we tell, or they will come and try to beat it out of us, but we still have some.

[s2mikon]

Yes, well said Crown Guy and and Deezl Smoke. Protecting idiots has allowed a bumper crop of more idiots to grow and flourish. My father used to tell me that the lessons I paid the most for I would remember the best. He was right. I grew up down the road from a egg farm and and went to school with his kids. The farmer taught me a valuable lesson. He would always have the non producers provide lunch and dinner for us. Now we have it ass backwards.