Changing rear Brake Shoes & Wheel Cylinders

[Oldman]

Courtesy Rev (Ian):
Decided to change the rear breaks pads and this is how I went about it.

You will need two sets of shoes, two wheel cylinders, and a break kit which includes new springs and clips. I also decided to replace the drums as well. Everything is available from The Buss Stop.

Rear brake shoes set of 4 complete $80.00
Rear wheel cylinders, German $28.00 each
Rear shoe fitting kit for two wheels $30.00
Rear Drum $125.00 each

After removing the rear wheels and the two small nuts holding the drum in place you should be able to remove the drum and reveal the rear shoes and wheel cylinder. My 75 bus looks like this.



Firstly I disconnected the hand break cable from the hand-break so that the cable was slack enough to remove from the hand-break lever attached to the shoes in the drum. There are two cables (one for each rear wheel) that are attached to a bracket by two square nuts coming from the hand-break towards the front of the bus, just in front of the steering arm. Mine looked like this..



Next I removed the cable from the hand-break leaver inside the drum...



Then I loosened off the rear shoe's via the adjusting stars at the bottom of the drum so that the pads where as lose as possible. I sprayed some WD40 on the stars so they would turn easier. You want to wind the stars so that the pads move to the center.

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Next I removed the bottom spring that holds the two shoe's together with a pair of pliers.  




With the break cable and bottom spring removed I was able to remove the shoes by pulling them from the adjusting adjusting screws at the bottom and and then out of the wheel cylinder at the top. The pad's came out with the spring at the top and the bar between the shoes still attached.