Folks Of Interest What would YOU do? [ brake FAILure ]

Thankee kindly Allen, I'll investigate this come Tuesday -- no answer today -- GOOD ONya!

 

Glad to help, Thomas. I installed my disc brake setup on mine (with a dual circuit master under the floor) and it works great - not good, but great. You won't be sorry you did it , trust me. You do a lot of driving , so you'll be happy to have that extra safety.

 

I always remembered it like this, drum brakes have a Napoleon Complex, the little shoe has to go out front to prove to the big shoe that he's got what it takes to stop the car, and when he can't do it alone he leans back into the big shoe and he does most of the work...

 

In the 70's when I was often doing several brake jobs a day in the Firestone store in Waco Tx the riveted shoes cost about half again what the bonded shoes did and you could get dirt cheap bonded shoes from a discount parts house up around the corner that actually had them in a bin as a bulk item. Those shoes didn't last all that long but they always stopped straight and were never noisy. I'd suspect that they may be similar to the ones that the op had in that I'd think the glue might have been a bit suspect.

As for primary/secondary the primary shoe is always the one with LESS friction material and is always in front. The lining may be shorter or it may have a groove down the middle. There was some brand in the 70's and 80's that had different color lining for primary and secondary shoes. Meaning that the primary shoes had a lower friction coefficient than the secondary shoes.

I saw new linings come off the shoes a couple of times years ago and attributed it to poor quality work or material on the relined shoes. In the past few years I've seen the lining on a couple of rigs I drug home fall out of the drum when I got the drum off and I figured that was due to rust because they had been sitting for years on end before I hauled them home.

 

Correct for some, like the Bendix, but not for all. Depends on the brake design.

 

These are manual adjust brakes -- the spring rubbing on the star is what keeps the setting from changin good eye tho

 

Since you brought it back up, I have been getting my shoes relined at a heavy duty brake/clutch place in Anaheim. I wonder if that would work out better material wise for you, there has to be one by you that does big truck stuff.

 

Driving a company truck 25 years ago when the front brake shoes fell off! The truck had just come from an outside shop for a brake job. I was pissed off more than I was scared. We had them tow it back and fix it but not until after I put my foot in the fuckers ass. It was a shop in Bloomington, Ca. They went out of business a couple of years after.

 

The place that made the shoes that disintegrated -- was out of business when I went back to complain I'd wondered at the decrepit look of the place while there [ dust to dust ]

That "spare set of 264 "soft" shoes on my "extres" shelf" -- that I'd got from E&M --- I put on and have been good since