hayalp!! . . . . . ive made it all go absolutely pete tong

[Tahrey1043]

Apologies for throwing this into general, but i'm in a little pickle....

Earlier on this eve, I acheived a happy thing...


but now i'm a bit stuck... to zoom in a little, which one of these little effers is the "upper return spring"??


i think it's the one arrowed, but i've hefted on that with pliers using both hands, til i had to get a torch (and until the battery ran out) and i can't get it off the... "wedge key", is it? It just keeps slipping out the bloody pliers.

more fool me for not getting that mk2 haynes i guess, but having to shell out a further £18 today just for a handle, a socket and some copper grease made me feel a bit light already.

Quick pointer would be very very much appreciated because the car is now up on axle stands outside... half on the road and half on the pavement (trust me - it's level. MASSIVE camber on that roadway) with the drum in the illustrated state. Rather not leave it like that overnight even though i'm gonna have to get a desk lamp and extension lead to finish it.

I just hope its not the one behind cuz i havent the faintest idea how i'll get THAT off... tips on how to remove THIS one would be enormous help too.

Grrr....!

[metz]

my haynes says the bottom spring is the "bottom return spring" so the one u have arrowed MUST be the the upper return spring, but haynes just says remove the lower ones to change the shoes.


maybe i'm wrong and can't read properly but thats how i saw it.

[Tahrey1043]

well i might pull the bottom one off first if it's got a good chance of reducing the tension on the top lot....... provided i can get it back on again!

are pliers really the best idea? I'm thinking of improvising with a coathanger... or claw hammer... or ANYTHING which will hook the stupid thing instead of gripping it ineffectually.

ps a good place to lubricate the shoe pivots, while the drum's off? they do seem to be a bit "sticky" even when there's no tension on the whole arrangement... i.e. bind-a-licious

[metz]

it shows the use of pliers in haynes

[Tahrey1043]

which haynes? ... i probably saw a pic but passed over it as i think it was a different spring

anyway a bit late for that now...... i got the spring off (dont ask me how..) but the rest of it's gone to hell through an alarming display of self-muppetry.............

vis a vis....



got the springy thingy off, which i now suspect is the adjuster/handbrake tensioner instead... things still not really easy to move, so coin flip between giving the handbrake a pull or gently pushing pedal, both of which didn't do any harm before. guess i might have been better going for handbrake, as pushing the pedal, well, i might have pushed too hard and sent it over the edge

the left cylinder piston has come out and seems to be stuck in a fully extended position. it wont go back in no matter how hard it's pushed or levered, but trying to undo the rubber seal to see whats going on results in quite a lot of fluid leakage (it's going everywhere). the self adjuster has come free and fallen down, and the wedge key is hanging loose and i cant see how to get it back in all that easily. the shoes are still nigh impossible to move... i can shift the right hand one outwards a little by combination of leverage with both mallet and screwdriver, but that's about it. attempts to remove other springs have so far come to naught. and oddly, the handbrake lever thing seems to have moved right more than just the left shoe's movement could explain.

arrrrgh.

gave up at midnight. this crap requires daylight, if only to make the true horror of it more apparent.

that photograph i beleive will prove to be most handy later on...

that and the self-destruction of the master cylinder cap. think something must have overpressured as the three components of that came apart when i undid it to remove the polythene, the top bit fell on the floor, and the little metal tab that connects the warning light contacts is still missing.

things i have learnt from this so far:
1. need a better pair of pliers
2. need mk2 haynes
3. probably going to need to charge batteries for bike lights to get to/from work tomorrow night
4. going to have to slap mk3 haynes writers silly ("remove upper return spring", if it's the rear one, surely being shorthand for "remove both brake shoes complete with springs")
5. garages EARN their money for dealing with this nonsense
6. do not meddle in the affairs of giants
7. tools are the main expense from a n00b point of view
8. it's impossible to NOT contaminate your shoe linings




/king muppet

[chubbster]

sorry fella but thats got to be the funniest thing ive read!!! reminds me why i pay my mate to do it! good luck with it anyway (i think you may need it!)

[GroovyCarrot]

Erk I'm afraid I can't really help, my two phobias in mechanics are carbs and brake drums, so I know naff all about it.. It does look like you're in a bit of a pickle though

[Tahrey1043]

globbits

[madmatt]

drum brakes are as simple as ABC i carnt see the fuss is about but now you messed up bigtime get somone who knows what they are doing cos your gonna find u build itup and you will have no brakes (not a good thing) get it too a garage asap
cheers
matt
vw mechanic

[Tahrey1043]

to be serious for once

i dont know what you and dom are on with this "simple" BS matt

maybe you know 'em inside out and have hands like the incredible f***ing hulk

but i had to rope both my mum and an uncle who's well experienced in putting cars back together and is no weakling, and it was still an utter squealing pig of a job thats caused quite a bit of family tension and the upshot being "that car's a nail, sell it"..... and i dont know if i can avoid that now.
the poor bloke had to drop a kitchen extension he was working on and ended up with a massive graze and cut on his left hand and a large amount of grease and brake fluid on him. and he's the one who knows what he's doing. i'd have probably lost an arm trying it solo.

finally got the bastard back together about an hour and a half before i needed to drive it, including about 30 minutes spent bleeding the sod (without the pressure kit - he made me suffer the job of the pedal pumper as punishment) because i lost so much fluid from the old cylinder. and it doesnt seem right anyway. i mean, i know im going to have to get it sorted professionally now - even the new shoe linings ended up covered in grease because in the end we simply couldn't be arsed to do anything other than get it back together in a way that meant i had both a wheel and a tensioned piston (so fluid didn't p*ss everywhere)... at £15 it was worth forfeiting em not to have to get a taxi or skip work - but it seems drastically tight. The shoes sound to be rubbing constantly, the wheel doesnt turn easily by hand, the handbrake is so much tighter than before, and anything more than moderate brake pressure locks that wheel solid.
not 100% sure that he put the bearing in the right way or tightened the hub nut up properly either (too tight!?!), but that's something to poke about with later on. the internals of the drum seemed different to what he expected but it still got mounted up quick enough.... who's to say.

looking over that guide on porka, unless there's something funny going on, there's no way optima got that handbrake cable attached to the disc by himself. it's a 2 man job... requiring 3 hands, 2 sets of pliers, ingenuity, time, and a lot of muscle.

learned a valuable lesson though.

i am never

ever

f**king ever

touching a drum brake again. (should have listened to my heart instead of money-grubbin' head and never touched it at all)

maybe not even to bleed it. if i do, and the nipple breaks... straight on the phone to the garage.

and disc calipers? screw that. (unc says they're more complex... though i'd be inclined to argue against that, i really dont want to run the risk)



The garage can have their £150. The potential for losing a finger or putting your back out with those springs is just far too great.

And i'm still not sure if i've got them on properly - none out of my own photographs, the ones in the porka guide, or of both the mk2 and mk3 haynes show properly how and where the top 2 springs should be attached.... especially the inboard one.

what insane spirit possessed me to do this saturday into bank hol monday rather than wednesday onwards?!?!

PS..... i spotted a can of "brake friction material cleaner" in halfords... i wonder if that would actually work?! haynes says there's no way of getting gunk out of it, but that text is probably more than 10 years old... (eg it says that the material will be asbestos based as well... not any more sonny jim)

oh and btw yes... i am driving "everywhere" (hardly anywhere) at 40mph tops in 3rd with one hand idling near the gearstick & handbrake...

[optima21]

no the hadbrake cable is easy enough to fit to the shoes, I use a pair or pliers and a pair of wire cutters. what you need to do is get the wire cutters to getip the end of the cable on the opposite side of the spring to the washer. then you grip the big lump at the end of the cable with a pair of pliers (while using the wire cutters too)

then you push the wire cutters tip against the pliers, so that moves the spring back and leaves a gap at the end. you then tighten the grip with the wire cutters and this leaves you with a free length of cable at the end. if you then move the pliers and repeat that a few times, you can the an inch of free cable which makes it much easier to asemble.

[bstardchild]

Might be being thick here but I've always found the best way to remove the springs is leave em on the shoes.

Undo the spring loaded clips that hold the shoes to the back plate (sort of push in and turn thingys) and then with the cylinders de-pressurised they don't take too much effort to get the shoes off as a pair.......

Once you have the pair in your hands orientating the shoes to free the springs is a bit like the rubicks cube - kinda twist and turn and he presto two separate shes and a pair of springs

[Tahrey1043]

getting em off - except for the small horizontal one at the top - is a piece of p1ss

it's getting the mother rapists back ON to the shoes that'll make you curse and think about torching the car

Dom/optima, i'm sure that tip works, but it ain't in your guide and i'm having trouble envisaging it just from the text (can't see how you'd be making the wire cutters touch the pliers for one thing) though I can... "feel"? (is that the word?) the sense behind it. Fancy adding that method in at the critical point in the porka post with some helpful pictures next time you have to change your shoes?

Oh by the way how strong was your spring when you did that? Mine was evil. Which is why i maintain at the moment that it's a 2 person job. It required 2 arms pulling power and 2 hands very tight grip to keep each set of pliers where they should be. In the end we resorted to something similar to your method, except i didnt have any wire cutters to hand - pulling the spring away from the bobble on the end as hard and as far as possible, then clamping another pair of pliers very hard onto the actual cable just ahead of it to stop it springing back, so that there was a free pair of hands to wrestle the cable into the miniscule space provided for it on the metalwork of the swingy bit of the shoe.

right, now im off to get the pictures out of the camera, because i would like to ask as a final thing whether i've put the springs in the right places. i cant see anywhere else they'd go, but it may still be wrong.