A couple of months ago, I purchased new brake drums all around. More than one of the existing drums are out of round and the front right tends to grab the pad at really unexpected times, trying to pull the car off the road.

After jacking up the rear driver side wheel, I pulled the old brake drum off.

Things are dry, which is good, but a little rusty.

After hosing everything down with brake parts cleaner and wiping down the new brake drum, I realized I had grabbed one of the new front brake drums. The part pictured above, 365-74004 is the rear drum.

These star adjuster wheels were both frozen/stuck. I spent a long time trying to get them freed up, spraying PB Blaster several times, before giving up. Finally, I just took the bottom spring off and was then able to pull the bottom ears of the brake shoes out of the adjuster ends. Then I used a large flat screwdriver to turn the adjuster bolts manually.

Eventually, I got a nice, snug fit of the new drum over the shoes and buttoned it all back up. I forgot to take a picture before I got the wheel back on.

You can kind of see a bit of it in there. It’s painted black and surprisingly, the brake parts cleaner didn’t seem to wipe the paint off, so that’s good.

Apparently, I gave up on documenting the process completely at this point, as the only other picture I took was once I finished up and was packing things away.

Unfortunately, I found that the passenger side rear drum was wet inside – black. Goopy and black. I wondered if the new brake cylinder I replaced last year was leaking again, but it doesn’t appear to be the case. The brake fluid reservoir is still completely tip-topped up.

Is it possible that transaxle oil is traveling down the axle?

I put the parking brake on full, put the car in neutral, and wasn’t able to push it. The brakes appear to be tight. I will take the car out for a runaround later today.

I was able to get the brake torn back apart and replaced the wheel cylinder again.

That’s the remnants of the bleeder screw in the bottom.

I bled the brakes all around and then adjusted them. It now has a great pedal, about 2/3 of a pedal, which is as good as it has ever been. It still doesn’t actually stop very well, but there is enough pedal to stand on if need be. It used to just clack against the floor board.

After adjusting the shoes at each wheel, I decided to check on the parking brake situation. Obviously, it wasn’t working too well. The wheel was turning when I was torquing on that rear axle nut with the parking brake on (and car in gear and wheel chocked).

I peeled back the tatty dust cover on the e-brake handle to get to the cable adjusters.

The one on the right was tightened down about half way, but with a broken screw head. The one on the left was tightened all the way down and the cable was slack.

So apparently, the parking brake hasn’t been applying on the driver’s side. That mystery is solved. And another TO DO item added to the list.

In an attempt to clean out my kitchen, which has turned into a tool shed and car parts storage, I bought a garden cart (Amazon link) to help shuttle my gear up and around from the basement.

That load would have normally taken five trips carrying everything by hand.

Foreshadowing in the title, there…

Now that the rear brake had been gushing fluid for nearly a month, inside of that brake drum was a mess. I didn’t snap a picture before hosing it down with brake cleaner. It was awful in there. A thick black, sludgy, fuzzy (?) mess. This pic is after a can of brake clean.

That’s a little more apparent on the back of this brake shoe.

I fought with that spring clip for a long time, which is probably why I took a picture of it. Take a break from swearing at it. Eventually, I got it off.

Everything went back together with the new hardware without any further issues. This was after work one evening and I only had an hour or so of daylight left to work with.

As I was buttoning everything up, checking that everything on the new wheel cylinder was tight…

The bleeder screw broke off in the cylinder. It probably cracked when tightening it, but it actually fell off while I was tightening the hard line below it. I whacked it with the wrench a couple of times and it fell apart.

I considered trying to use an easy out bolt extractor, but it would be $15 to buy one of those to try or $20 to replace the wheel cylinder (again).

So, off to O’Reilly I went. Luckily (and surprisingly) it’s a part they keep in stock (O’Reilly link).

After a successful second master cylinder replacement, I went back out a couple of weeks later to adjust the brake shoes and found that both rear wheel cylinders were blown. Brake fluid all over the place in the rear. I ordered new wheel cylinders for the front (Amazon link) and rear (Amazon link), figuring the fronts would blow after replacing the rears – pressure finding the next weakest point in the pipeline.

Once I had the parts in hand, while having my morning coffee at the start of installation day, I figured I may as well replace the shoes and hardware while I was in there. Shopping around online, I found that O’Reilly had the parts in stock. Went and picked everything up and was ready to go.

I started at the passenger rear, just like when bleeding the brakes. I was worried about the axle nut, a 32mm castle nut. I didn’t have that big of a socket, so I picked on of those up as well.

Everything came apart without issue and was surprisingly easy. I was expecting a more complicated setup, but not so much.

That picture was taken after blowing half a can of Brake Kleen and wiping everything down. The shoes were about half-life.

One of the washers on the back side crumbled. Replaced it with the closest I could find laying around in my somewhat organized hardware pile.

New shoes and old shoes side by side. The old hand cleaner can is a good brake fluid catcher. It’s also a good oil pan for changing the lawn mower oil.

New parts waiting to go.

As I was reassembling, there were some snags, like one of the pre-drilled holes in the shoe not being big enough for the pin.

I also had to mix and match some of the old and new parts. The new springs were significantly taller than the old springs. I couldn’t get them compressed far enough, so reused the old springs. It was still a very tight fit.

I put the drum back on, took it off, adjusted the shoes, repeated that process ten times or so, getting a nice, snug fit.

Got that wheel back together, but when I went around to do the passenger side rear wheel, the axle nut was not budging. I decided to go ahead and bleed that rear passenger side, but my manual brake bleeder vacuum gun promptly blew out and started squirting brake fluid in my face.

I was able to finish bleeding it with minimal brake fluid ingested.

AutoZone was the only place in town that had one of those manual brake bleeder vacuum guns in stock, so I headed over there. Saw this sweet 1964 Galaxie 500 in the parking lot.