Thursday, April 05, 2007

Brake check

Last weekend I spent some time under the front end of the truck. I am starting to realize that the front suspension ans steering systems are in serious need of attention. The ball joints and tie rod ends all look to be shot, but I'll wait for a little more experienced advice before I start replacing anything.

Anyways, I way pretty sure that the front brakes had never been opened up. After I got the wheels off, I found some rivets that held everything in place during factory assembly. So it looked like they had never been serviced.

I ground off the rivet heads and pulled the drums off. No big surprises inside, except for a huge number of wasps nests that fell out of the passenger side brake drum. I tried to clean everything up and look for any obvious damage. Once I was satisfied that everything was still in place and the brake shoes looked OK, I installed a better set of drums that I had and closed everything up.

I still need to work on the adjustment a little bit. The brakes are pulling to the left a little bit now. But I'll save that for another weekend. Like this one.

2 comments:

Rick said...

It hadn't occurred to me that you had drums on the front, but that does make since. My 72 has disks.

Mike said...

I think 71 was the first year of disks. But the calipers and everything was a one year item. Seems that the 72+ is a lot more interchangeable.

The drums work OK, but I would defiently upgerade if it were to be a daily driver.