Rear Brakes Refurb

I had the car in for it’s mot recently,  it passed but the tester commented that although the brakes were up to the standard required the handbrake was binding on one of the rear wheels.

One of the jobs already on my list was to remove the drums as the handbrake was no where as good as that on the mgb.

After working out how to release the auto adjusters the drums came off quite easily to discover that the brake wheel cylinders were cylinders seized except for one of the 4 pistons! Also based on the amount of cobwebs and spider cocoons in the drums that the car had obviously been in storage for a long time.

So new set of brake shoes and wheel cylinders purchased. After swopping all the handbrake mechanism over to the new shoes it all went together OK- trickiest but was holding the shoes on place whilst fitting the springs – overcome by a couple of g-clamps to temporarily hold them in place.

Once re-assembled I bled the rear cylinders to remove any air in the system. If I were doing this job again I would get replacement circlips for the pivots holding the handbrake lever in place on each of the shoes.

Anyway after getting it all back together again all seemed to work fine ……. think I’ll check the front brakes are working correctly next and not partially seized.