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I'll preface this by saying that I have not yet pulled the drums to check things out, but I have a pretty good idea what is wrong...
You may recall that I fought horrible gas mileage tooth-and-nail for months at the height of the gas prices only to discover that my rear brake self-adjusters had adjusted themselves to the point of destroying my rear brake pads. I don't know why I could not feel the drag but when I pulled those drums, the pads were paper thin and the drums were full of dust.
So, I swapped the assemblies with the manually adjusted mechanisms left over from my 1967. That worked great and my mileage shot up 5 more mpg.
However, I was also suffering from excessive pinion gear slop and eventually the old axle started making all sorts of weird mechanical-failure noises. So I pulled the axle and installed another 1968 rear axle (that Mario_E was kind enough to let me have off his parts car - thank again Mario!). I swapped in the replacement and the noises went away. The replacement also had good clean brake parts and thick shoes, so I left the self-adjuster assemblies on.
However... it appears that I am to be cursed by the self-adjusting rear brakes again. yesterday afternoon I began to feel the car pulling me back. It drove and stopped okay, but I realized it felt like I was "dragging" A finger-check when I returned home demonstrated that my drums had gotten extremely hot, plus the paint was burned off on the outer surface of the drums. Damn!
These things seem to adjust themselves into oblivion. Does everyone have this problem or am I just unlucky/incapable of getting them right?
A co-worked once suggested that you could remove the self-adjusting mechanism w/o swapping the drums/brake assemblies. Is that possible? Is it safe?
Should I just put the 67 drum units back on and give up on the 68-style.
times like this, I wish that I had a spare 1800E axle to install...
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