LX 570 Soft Brakes

[NDizzle]

I'm having somewhat similar issues. Not as drastic as yours, but annoyingly poor brake performance. If I pump the brakes a few times, pressure builds and it feels like it should. Normal (single) presses with constant pressure does stop the vehicle, and I don't have to put the pedal to the floor, but it's really bothering me knowing that I could pump twice and have about double the braking power for the amount of pressure that I am applying.

I'm going to call a few dealerships that service a lot of land cruisers and see what they think. At my local dealership mine is the only 200 series they have ever seen. Not exactly confidence inspiring.

 

[TeCKis300]

^If you have a Lexus dealer nearby, you might consider bringing your LC to them. They see many more 200-series vehicles. The LX would have an identical brake setup. They have also dealt with electro-hydraulic brake boosters for over a decade on various Lexus models, rather than the vacuum brake boosters more typically fitted to Toyota's.

 

[NDizzle]

Update on my personal issue... a brake flush and a bleed using the scan tool seem to have fixed the issue. What's concerning is that my local Toyota dealership couldn't set the max level correctly in the brake reservoir. I had to point out that the instructions were literally on the reservoir. The service manager had to come out with the suction bottle and remove fluid. Kind of ridiculous, but there you go. Bleed with tech stream if you find yourself having to pump to build pressure.

I also learned a lot from @2001LC 's great thread here. My accumulator would refill in 16 seconds on the dot. A LOT of great information here.

Scored 2011 LC W/79K OMG CLEAN (2012 missing link)

 

[marques]

+1 on the master cylinder bleed with Techstream. I recently had a similar issue with the brakes going soft all of a sudden and without explanation. Pumping the brakes helped a little bit, but I couldn’t even keep the truck stopped at a red light unless I shifted into neutral. I feared the worst and was ready to rebuild the master cylinder with the $60 kit (new piston assembly with all the seals). But just for the hell of it I decided to completely flush the system including the master cylinder with the techstream before doing anything more invasive and time consuming.

To my surprise, a LOT of air came out of the front calipers. I have no idea how it got there. This is the first time I used Techstream to bleed it, and now have a solid and perfectly normal brake pedal. A few notes: to bleed the front lines, you will be asked to keep the bleed nipples shut, and to “press and hold” the brake pedal while you click a button and wait about 4 seconds. You need to press the pedal lightly and hold it, click on the button, then keep the pressure constant and let the pedal drop. After the 4 seconds you will be instructed to release the pedal and press a button again, which is just a ~20 second timer to I guess let bubbles bubble up to where they need to go. If you Initially press the pedal too hard and it drops too much you will get an error message telling you the procedure failed. Don’t worry; just repeat but don’t press the brake pedal too far down at the beginning of the procedure.

What the computer won’t tell you is that you didn’t really bleed the front left/right lines. What you did was to bleed the air from the master cylinder into the front lines. The air will still be in the lines and you will need to bleed the front calipers the old fashioned way to get rid of all the air.

The rear brakes are easy. I honestly think they are 100% electronically actuated and there is no direct mechanical connection with the piston in the master cylinder. So all you need to do is open the rear bleed nipples with the ignition on, press the brake pedal down a little bit, and the system will start pumping brake fluid thru.

After flushing nearly 2 quarts of new fluid getting rid of all the air, everything is back to normal with a solid pedal. And I didn’t have to spend >$1,000 on a new master cylinder!

 

[ARKginger]

That's good to know about the Techstream and I really need to look into doing that myself. I ended up installing some Centric 120.44162, 120.44157, & StopTech 309.13030 in March based of some recommendations here. After a couple of months using them I can say that the brake feel is much better than it was before with whatever generic components installed by the previous owner.

 

[ARKginger]

Update: did the techstream brake bleed and that improved brake feel for a while. I was still not happy with the overall stopping, so I went ahead and upgraded to tundra brakes with a generic kit. 6 months later I can say that was the best decision I've made. I suspect one of the original calipers could have been taking on some air which was causing the issues in the first place