Brake shoes -- the thick one goes in the back, yes?

[dremu]

Been a while since I've done drum brakes, and my memory is struggling with the adjustment process. Just to double-check, the thicker shoe goes in the back and the thinner one up front, yes?

-- A

 

[sweetk30]

short or thin = front

tall or thick = back

 

[dremu]

Phew. Thanks.

-- A

 

[4X4HIGH]

Lets not say "thick" or "thin" but rather primary and secondary. The primary shoe is the short one and goes to the front and obviously that would leave the secondary or long shoe to go to the rear.

 

[Fordum]

obviously that would leave the secondary or long shoe to go to the rear.

Au Contraire.
You forget we are dealing with humans.....
Had a guy call me because his brakes were acting strange after he did a brake job.
Pulled one side off, looked OK. Pulled the other side off, looked OK. Then something clicked.
Looked again, he had two primary shoes on one side and two secondary shoes on the other.........

 

[TerryD]

Adjustment procedure is to slip on the drum. Turn the adjusters with a brake spoon, rotating the drum intermittently, till the drum will not spin. Back it off until the drum spins freely again. Your drums are now adjusted.

We run a few without the park brake cables where the automatic adjusters don't function properly. On those, we turn the adjusters out till you almost can't turn the drum by hand.

 

[4X4HIGH]

Lets not say "thick" or "thin" but rather primary and secondary. The primary shoe is the short one and goes to the front and obviously that would leave the secondary or long shoe to go to the rear.

Au Contraire.
You forget we are dealing with humans.....
Had a guy call me because his brakes were acting strange after he did a brake job.
Pulled one side off, looked OK. Pulled the other side off, looked OK. Then something clicked.
Looked again, he had two primary shoes on one side and two secondary shoes on the other.........

If you placed the primary shoe as I said THEN that would obviously leave the remaining "long" shoes for the secondary or rear shoe.

 

[Fordum]

If you placed the primary shoe as I said THEN that would obviously leave the remaining "long" shoes for the secondary or rear shoe.

I agree, but in this case, he was doing both sides at the same time, apparently dumped both sets of new shoes out at the same time, and somehow managed to wind up with two short ones on one side and two long ones on the other.

Like I say, when dealing with humans.........

Actually, now that I think about it more, he did say that was the way they came.
So, I guess it was a complete axle kit with both sets in one box. He reached in, got a primary shoe, and put it on.
That left three shoes in the box.
When he reached for the next shoe, it was his bad luck to grab another primary shoe.
When he started on the other side, he had two secondary shoes left and never noticed the difference.

What the heck, it was about 1971, so the details are starting to fade......

 

[4X4HIGH]

Well Fordum, this is a case of the guy didn't know what he was doing and simply either installed the shoes the same way someone else had them on the vehicle OR he just randomly grabbed the shoes out of the box and started installing them (not knowing there are primary and secondary shoes).

 

[Fordum]

Like I say, it was over 40 years ago, why did a chill just go down my back??????

But as I vaguely remember it, the reason he called me was because he was not too sure what he was doing.
NAPA, which was pretty much the only parts store in town back then, sold full axle sets of shoes in cardboard boxes.
Two primaries and two secondaries.

So that is most likely what he did. Got the old shoes off without noticing the difference, if there even was any.
The old ones might have been down to the metal.
Then just pulled two shoes out of the box and put them on.

Went to the other side and did it again.
I do remember the reason I did not catch it right away was because he only had one jack and I could only look at one side at a time.

We were actually tightening the lugs on the second wheel when it dawned on me what I had seen.
I got the little 1-1/2 ton NAPA bottle jack out of my old jeep and we pulled both drums off.

At that time it was obvious.

And yeah, we worked on it with it on two bottle jacks without jackstands.
In those days it was fairly common.
Only shops had jackstands, and even they usually only used them for long term work like a full diff repair.
One of the first things you learned was to keep important stuff out from under the brake plate.
It was expected that it would fall off the jack every so often.

If you did not want to have to straighten the plate, you put a log or something under the axle tube so it would not reach the ground.

AH, the good old days...........