Is there any benefit to keeping the brake metering valve? Is it necessary? I think it was the reason I wasted two hours trying to bleed out my brakes last night. I tried bleeding the brakes like I normally would, but I just couldn't get them to bleed. I think the fronts were causing problems because of a collapsed hose, but it could have been the valve. Should I by-pass it or figure out how to bleed through it?
I shouldn't have any problems using a hand vacuum pump to bleed them right?
I saw some posts about this, but none actually asking if the valve should be kept.

Thanks.

I constantly had to bleed the air from the front brakes in my ’67 with factory disks. At first I thought it was sucking it in through the calipers and had them sleeved with stainless steel. The problem persisted until I bypassed the hold off valve over a year ago.

I plan to rebuild or replace the valve but I have not noticed any braking problems with the valve bypassed. The funny thing is the valve was not leaking any fluid, just sucking in air causing the brakes to get soft over time. I have not tried a panic stop with the valve bypassed.

it shouldn't affect panic stopping.
As I understand it, it's supposed to be a low pressure valve to help balance disc/drum brakes during light braking, and when braking (or stopped with auto trans) on snow/ice.

It isn't supposed to hinder manual or gravity bleeding, but pressure bleeders operate in the range where the valve is closed, so there is a button on it to hold it open.

Here's a good article with some info on metering valves:
http://www.babcox.com/editorial/bf/bf50014.htm

I dont think you'd be unsafe without it, unless you drive on snow/ice. If you have a light foot for the brakes, or often ride them lightly, you wont get much use out of the rears, so might overwork the fronts.

You can do without the valve. I have some explination on my web page here:
http://www.pozziracing.com/brakes.htm#Converting_Drums_to_Discs
The button is for pressure bleeding the front brakes. The valve won't allow fluid to pass until 40-50 psi is reached and that is too high a pressure for most pressure bleeders.

If you manually bleed the system, you don't need to depress the button, also you can hook up a pressure bleeder and pump the brakes to bleed without pushing the button. It takes a special tool to hold the button down or it will pop back up when the system has pressure.

Next time I'll have to give your suggestions a try. I replaced both the front brake hoses tonight and bled the system the old fashioned way. "Hey WIFE, come out here and pump the brakes!" It worked this time. Those two flex hoses must have been collapsed and were what was causing my problems last night. I just got back from a test run and I didn't have to pull it off a tree, so I guess it worked... I locked it up going down the driveway on my way out and it was ok.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

There may some details here that could help.
This is the instructions that came with my EIS replacement master. I hope it's ledgible!
http://img160.echo.cx/img160/1145/brakemastercylinderinfo4lu.jpg
http://img160.echo.cx/img160/8615/brakemastercylinderinfo19ke.jpg