Skip to main content
Gerry | Vanagon
Checking account...
← vanagon.com home · Continue the discussion in the forum
Subject:Re: True Lies (was Re: Rear Drum removal)
From:Tom Young
Date:Wed, 6 May 1998 18:37:43 -0700

On Wed, 6 May 1998, Gary Shea wrote:

> [snip] drove out of the lot, and as I braked for
> the first corner, felt a powerful rhythmic bumping in the brake
> pedal, like maybe about the rpm of the drum going around...
> so I took it back to the shop, and asked a young kid there if
> he knew how they'd removed the drums.  Said his dad whacked on
> 'em with a sledge until they came off.
>
> Then I talked to the owner (the kid's dad), not mentioning what
> his son had told me, but indicating that the drums were trashed.
> Asked him if they'd use a puller on the drums.  He said yes, they
> had, but was willing to fix the problem.

I'm pretty sure you can trash a drum if you hit it on the curved face of its
outer _diameter_ instead of the perimeter of the flat drum face.  Because
you're trying to break the rust bond between the inside face of the drum
and the flat face of the hub, you need to "rock" the drum out of the
plane of the flat face.  Hitting the curved outer diameter of the drum
sure wouldn't accomplish this very readily until you hit the drum with
_lots_ of force.  Sounds like that's what they did.

Maybe there's some sort of puller you can use on these drums (not the
hub, the drum) but it seems improbable: the brake backing plate prevents
you from getting a grip on the edge of the drum itself, so the only way
to "attach" the puller to the drum would be with some sort of tightened
band (like a huge hose clamp) that you would wrap around the drum itself.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Tom Young                young@sherlock.SIMS.Berkeley.EDU
Lafayette, CA  94549     '81 Vanagon
---------------------------------------------------------------------