Manual drums question

I usually lube the bleed nipple days prior and even then you can have that problem. When you were doing the one person bleeding, you mention that all you got was some dirty brake fluid, that is what you are going to get in the bottle, that’s normal. It’s really hard to tell if you are still pushing a lot of air out with the one person method because most of your visual would be when you are depressing the pedal and of course you can’t see the bottle at that time, make sure your tube is always submerged or you are just sucking air back in when you let off the pedal.

This is why the two person method is best, someone can see what’s happening and they can open and close the nipple as necessary. Again if you didn’t get a good bench bleed then you may at some point need to try to bleed the master. You can do this with two people while the master is on the car, you would need to crack open the break line fitting at the master, just barley crack it open, have someone slowly depress the pedal and hold, then tighten the fitting back before the pedal is released. Be sure you have some towels or something under. Try tapping on the master with something like a wrench randomly to help break up the air bubbles.

Be patient, bleeding can take time and even after much time and bleeding and a couple bottles of fluid, you can still have some air but you should be able to get enough out to see a major improvement. Was your new master you bought a rebuilt? I have bought a many of rebuilt parts like that and turned out they were just bad. This recently happened with a vacuum booster, installed a rebuild one, had the same problem as before and turned out the dang thing was just bad, its happened with master cylinders too, good luck.

Thought I'd follow up/close-out this thread.  I tried a bunch of methods to get the stripped bleeder valve out with no luck.  Ended up pulling the wheel cylinder out and placing it in a vice to try and get it unstuck...no luck.  So I ended up buying a new wheel cylinder (which, for $10 I should have done long ago in this process) :)  These bleeder valves are sensitive.  I ended up replacing another one with a brand new one that I hand tightened just to get in there and THAT ended up getting stuck.  Fortunately, I learn from my mistakes and ended up getting it out without a whole heck of a lot of trouble.  It took all day, but I ended up getting the system bled and the brakes work.  Still takes quite a bit of pressure to stop but like I said earlier...I've never driven manual drum brakes so I believe they are what they should be.  MUCH better than they were.  Thanks everyone for the help!

Word regarding hydraulics: the fluid will find the weakest point and escape. As a general rule, always replace both wheel cylinders in a single system. You brakes are TWO systems, front and rear are independent obviously. So if you replace ONE front wheel cylinder, the other is the weakest link. That's why you replace both. On calipers, the same is true but it's rare that they leak. Instead they will often move at different rates if only one is replaced. FYI, this was a question on the ASE brake certification exam 30 years ago.