Outer Limits 4x4 Board

When I park on an incline facing down, the hand brake holds without a problem. If I park facing up, then it is a waist of time putting on the hand brake at all. I've adjusted the cables with no change and the shoes look ok (only 8 months old). This has been a problem for awhile but is getting worse.

I have an idea that maybe the drums need replacing (they have been machined) but does anyone else have any suggestions

Because of the way a drum brake is designed they work realy well in forward montion, but crap in reverse. If you look inside a drum brake the shoes are in in a way that they pull them selves in tighter if forward movment is applied.

Somebody else will have a better way to explain it.

Adjusting the cables is the last thing you do.
First you clean out the drums after any wading ,mud or sand.
Then you adjust off the H/B cable.
Then you adjust up the rear brakes at the wheels,through the hole in the backing plate.
Then you adjust up the cable.
If you don't do it this way you work one shoe ,the front one ,more than the other.The front shoe does the forwards braking and the rear for reverse.This is one reason why the front shoe wears out faster.
J Top

J Top wrote:If you don't do it this way you work one shoe ,the front one ,more than the other.The front shoe does the forwards braking and the rear for reverse.This is one reason why the front shoe wears out faster.
J Top

is this really true, will all my drum brake cars aver the years, i have never had the front shoe wear quicker than the rear?

They are more correctly known as the leading and trailing shoe.

The leading shoe has the free edge at the point of initial rotation such that when it is applied it tends to jam itself into the drum ("bite"), wearing down the upper edge of the shoe. The trailing shoe has forces that tend to drag the friction surface across the drum rather than jam the friction surface into the drum under braking, so does not wear as quickly.

If you reverse the drum rotation, the relationship between the shoes is also reversed, so what was the trailing shoe is now the leading shoe. The shoes are not specifically designed to stop only in one direction only, but the effect is that the one shoe tends to wear faster because we tend to drive mainly in one direction.

You could also have a handbrake cable seizing up, not allowing full force on the shoes.