So after much thinking, pondering responses and eyeballing things, we may have come up with an interesting solution for the rear brakes. Drum brakes...

Before you jump all over us for such a hair-brained idea, hear us out. Firstly, we recognize most people would hate the drum brakes on the back of the 122 (and 1800)a little less if they were somewhat easier to service. Pulling the hub is a pain and in cases where the proper tool is not available, downright impossible. Secondly, if the rear drums didn't cost an arm and a leg to replace and didn't involve pulling the whole hub assembly in order to do so, you'd likely hate them a little less too. We felt if we could design a hub/drum combo that would work like most normal drum-brake setups, we might have part of a winning solution. We also felt if we could design this hub correctly, an upgrade to disc brakes might not be nearly as difficult. More on this later...

Taking these factors into account, we set out to find a readily available brake drum that would closely match the dimensions of the Volvo drum. To our surprise there are a couple of very popular vehicles that fit this description so we picked up some brake drums. Unfortunately we could not find a drum that will work without modification. The question then was, do we supply a consumable product that is available from only one source? Our other option was to look at making a modified hub that would enable one to use this readily available brake drum. This seems like a much more logical solution and, to our surprise, wasn't nearly as expensive as we thought it might be. In fact, one may be able to purchase the new hubs and a set of drums for less than a set of stock replacement drums.

What are the pros?
- cheap consumable brake drum available at any parts store.
- long-term stability. With a custom drum, if Avalanche goes out of business, drums are no longer available. Once you've bought the hub, there is no need to buy any of the supporting assembly from Avalanche.
- the new hub would be made of chromoly steel and would be stronger and far more precise than the factory piece and would include a proper flange for the drum to pilot on (the factory drum is located only by the wheel studs)
-servicing brakes becomes a simple process of pulling the wheel and removing the brake drum. No special tools required.

What are the cons?

-not original...something the purists will bring up. However, I would venture to say the purists won't be looking at anything but original parts for their cars so it's a bit of a non-issue.
-not an upgrade to the stock brakes in terms of performance. It's simply an upgrade in terms of long-term parts availability and cost of consumables.

Now...the disc brake possibility...

The drum we are working with comes from a rear end that also offered a disc brake setup. There is a good possibility the hub will work for both a drum and a rotor. For the disc brake conversion we would have to supply a caliper adapter bracket and the necessary bracketry to make the parking brake work. The caliper we would use has a parking brake built in so no need for a drum to maintain the parking brake. This component is very much in the head-scratching stage so please don't ask how much and where to send your money. For that matter, until we get a prototype hub done up and fit all the parts together, the drum option is not available either. We are just tossing this out to get feedback and to that end, please feel free to provide the aforementioned feedback...

Cheers,

--
Dale