Land Rover sticky brake shoes

 23 June 2024

      For a while now folks have been dealing with sticking brake shoes after replacing the shoes and sometimes the shoes and drums. The drums rotate fine when going forward and lock on when in reverse. I put the fault at substandard parts.

     Now with my trailer brakes I get to experience it first hand. And here is what I found out and how I fixed the issue.

   For a while now the advice was to just chamfer the leading edge of the trailing shoe. With that in mind when I put on my new shoes I chamfered the leading edge on both shoes. paying more attention to the trailing shoe. Oddly I only had the issue on one brake.

Here is the initial setup before I did anything.

The first thing I found was it didn't stick until I tightened the screws in the drum and mine was sticking when rotating forward. Then I used my angle grinder to remove some of the material off the shoes.

Back on it went;

Still it stuck. I removed the drum and really began to check things out. I noticed that even with no fluid pressure the front piston was coming out further. I pushed and pulled to make them equal and the rear went in and the front out, every time. Something in the cylinder? I even opened the bleed screw to let any pressure out.

Next suspecting the pad to be part of the issue with an improper curve or thickness I began a series of rotating the drum, causing a scuff on the pad and then grinding or filing the pad down at the scuff mark. In the pics the scuff mark is darker and the filing is lighter. Each time the screws had to be tightened and removed, by the time this day was done my right thumb needed icing!

The last scuff was this one and after the subsequent material removal it freely turned in both directions.

So for me in this 1 instance I put it to being what ever is causing the piston to push out and not stay retracted and the shape of the pad against the drum. Since the drums are old I don't know how true they are either.

On another front I took a couple of old aluminum wheel cylinders apart to recycle them. Here's the pics.