Six Months of Brakes

Once the truck was up on blocks, I decided to do the brakes, starting with the left rear. I had always suspected foul play in this one, as a previous post had mentioned, because the truck always used to pull to the right when the brakes were applied. The greater the pressure applied on the brakes, the greater the pull. Slamming on the brakes once had actually caused my truck to lurch off the road on two wheels once. Ah, memories.

I'd post a picture of the brake drum of the offending wheel, but I gave it to a scrap guy before I thought of that. I'll attempt to describe to you this surprising feat of things wearing out and breaking. Imagine a brake drum as a short, heavy pot. This pot slides over the rest of the brake mechanism, bottom side away from the car. The wheel then mounts up against the bottom of this pot. Get the picture? The car stops when the brake mechanism inside the pot (or drum) applies pressure to the inner wall of the rim of the drum. The friction is what slows the car.

Now imagine what it would look like if the sides of the pot were to break loose from the bottom. You would only have the flat bottom and the ring like piece that was the sides. Now imagine this side piece cracked across in one place, to form a tightly closed C shape. That's pretty much what happened. This C shaped ring was forced by the brake mechanism to open up (making the crack wider) until it was bigger around than the flat bottom it broke off from. It then dropped down over that flat bottom until it was no longer in contact with the mechanism, and then it clamped down tightly as the C tried to close back into a ring.

The end result was a very odd looking brake drum. It took me a while to figure out why it looked like it did. This drum was removed and disposed of. I'd like to backtrack for a moment to my first experience with drum brakes. The left rear brake on my Camaro was leaking fluid some years ago. My dad, with his years of experience with cars, took one look at it, and then proceeded to remove all of the components of the mechanism with surprising speed. I don't remember what was said at this point, but whatever it was irritated my father to the point where he went back inside, leaving me with a pile of levers and springs and things and no clue how to assemble them, since I wasn't the one that took it apart. Between my Haynes manual, Nick's dad, and taking the other wheel off to look, I learned the hard way how they go together.

When I pulled the rear brake drums off the truck I was surprised to see that, despite a 25 year difference between the cars, the brakes were virtually identical. I had both drums off at the same time, experience, and no book. I did manage to remove all the hardware and replace it all, replacing the old springs and, well, a piece I lost. The springs and levers and things and brake shoes (the part that rubs on the inside of the drum) all go on at the same time.

Update

All right, so I suppose I'm running a little behind on the updates. But, I'm running way behind on progress, too.

I'll start by explaining the photograph posted in early October. Sparing the sob story of how I got there, I've rented a house in Sanford, complete with two car garage. It took some time, but I've gotten everything to fit in there and even have a little room left over to work. Renting the house, of course, was a lot easier than getting the truck there. My *ahem* brilliant plan of insuring, registering, and driving the truck the 18 miles crashed and burned spectacularly. I'll save that for later.


ON THE MOVE
I moved in at the beginning of October, and the truck got here from Jen's a few weeks later. She has been complaining for months about a rectangle in her back yard where there is no grass. I have not yet been able to convince her that it doesn't exist, but eventually the summer rains will take care of that.

This time to move it I rented a car hauler from U-haul. Despite the idea mentioned above about driving it, once I decided to tow it, there was no sense in taking a chance with the old tires by leaving them on the ground. A few cans of fix-a-flat got the tires up enough to get the truck out of the backyard, after taking the fence back down and using all but 4" of space between J's house and the neighbor's A/C unit. I hauled the thing to my house with my new'07 Toyota Tacoma with the V-6 towing package and a 6,500 reese hitch. Just for safety, I stuck to back roads and never went more than 35. Hayden was following me just in case. One never knows what *might* happen.

DETIREMENT AND THAT'S THE BRAKES
This brings us up to speed to the above photograph. I cannot tell you how excited I was to finally have a garage! After getting a few things arranged in there, a plan for how to proceed came forth- get new tires so I can roll it out once in a while. I had the old tires pulled off the rims at a nearby shop and left them outside my house by the curb for our city's Cleanup day. They didn't come on the appointed day, so I moved them back up by the house to await the next trash day. They mysteriously disappeared the next Saturday. I began wire brushing the rims and have discovered a dilemma- what color should they be? I really like the look of the black rims with the chrome rings, But now the truck will have white bumpers, so they won't match. Chrome rims aren't in the budget right now. I decided to just prime them and figure it out later. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment on this post.

Now that the truck was up on blocks in the garage, it came to my attention that the brakes needed work, and now would be an opportune time to do that. Now, even when I was driving the truck every day (back in the late '90's) I was having problems with the brakes. The truck pulled to the right every time I stepped on them, and the harder I braked, the harder it pulled. Back then I eventually decided that the left rear brake wasn't working. Also back then the right front drum actually broke apart on me coming down the highway. In modern times, I decided that I would replace all the drums. The afore mentioned left rear was sporting not only a broken drum, but a seized cylinder. All right, new drums and cylinders all around. Might was well do the shoes and hardware, too. In removing the seized cylinder, I twisted the steel brake line. New brake lines. I opened the master cylinder and it was dry and rusted badly inside. All right, whole new brake system from one end to the other. Might was well do it now. It was at this point I experienced another delay.


ADDING YEARS TO THE PROJECT
This blog is not the venue for my opinions on things very far outside my truck. Three weeks after I moved into my house, my company decided to move me to a 2 year project in south Florida, 5 hours away from home. This was after I had been told that I was to be in the office for a few years. This means the obvious destruction of my goal mentioned in the first post of having it done by spring of '09. I am not happy about it. Now, I come back up most weekends, and many times, I don't even get to work on the truck. I have been working on the brakes for the better part of six months now, so it's hard to give a timeline of what happened when. Immediately after having moved to south Florida, my truck was broken into and my camera stolen, which explains the general lack of pictures in this post. (No, I haven't bought a new one yet.) My efforts to get transferred out of that hell-hole have failed. So much for progress. I also had to drop out of the welding class I was taking at the local community college.

In my next post I will attempt to recount how working on the brakes has gone.