Saturday more bug – brakes/tranny

 Saturday…

Oh yeah, did I mention it’s only been like 20 or so degrees F?  This car work has surprisingly not been too bad, but my nose is definitely running while I’m out there.

Anyway, I headed out in the morning.

By now I’d gathered enough information that said that I might be able to shove a screwdriver in the drain plug hole of the tranny and hopefully shove the shift fork so that it would get out of 3rd gear.  I monkeyed with it for a while.  No such luck.  I can see where the fork is for 1-2 shifts at the fill plug, but not the 3-4 fork I’m looking for…

Started monkeying with wheels and brakes.  Cleaning up the threads on the original lugnuts and then running them on the studs so I can get the new lugnuts on without screwing up the threads any more than necessary.

Also took off the chevy spacers which was more needed on the front wheel which was missing a stud and then turned out two of the studs are either the wrong thread, or just messed up enough that I can’t for the life of me get any lugnut on them.

Then went to looking at the brakes.  Started at the right rear, no cotter pin visible in the axle.  Hey, those axle nut sockets that I figured I would never need again came in handy, I actually had a 36MM socket as needed!  However, with the weight of the buggy, there’s no way the nut was going to turn before the wheel.  I jammed a pry bar in the wheel against the frame.  Nope.  3′ breaker bar was not cutting it.  I got out my 3-4′ pipe to put on it for more leverage.  The bar was bending more than I was comfortable with and no movement.  OK, let’s try the left rear wheel…

Found a nail in the cotter pin hole, got that out and then the nut came off at about hand tightened tightness.  Wasn’t too difficult to get the drum off.  I’m not used to these stupid drum brakes that require opening up wheel bearings to get to brakes.  Seems like a stupid idea to me because for one you’re monkeying with the wheel bearings when you don’t need to.  More importantly you’re opening the wheel bearings and all of their grease to all of the junk/dust/dirt that’s in the brakes.  *sigh*.

Anyway, got the brake drum off.  One shoe came off inside the drum, no longer attached to the backing.  Then the other was also off it’s backing just laying there.  It was somewhat difficult to tell just what was supposed to be where.  I determined that having those drums sitting in mud for a few years wasn’t great.  Basically the bottom half of the drum was full of frozen mud/dirt/whatever.  I chipped away with the screwdriver and hammer.  The spring hardware was all rusted out and in pieces, if there at all.  Went to see if the wheel cylinder would move and it immediately just broke off a tab with very little effort on my part.

Finally found the adjusters buried in the gunk at the bottom and with enough PB Blaster/vice grips/big adjustable pliers, I managed to get them to start moving(which greatly surprised me).  And with enough time/effort I actually got them moving to a level that didn’t require vice-grips.  I’m not entirely decided, but I think they may be usable enough for now.  We’ll see when we get the parts back in there.

Tried getting the brake line out of the wheel cylinder, but as expected, no go with wrench.  I ended up snipping the line at both ends and using a socket.

Tried to figure out what to do for parking brake.  I think there may be some other sort of missing part that goes inside the drum, and I’m pretty sure stock cables aren’t going to work too well because of length and likely attachment points.  I did hoever managed to get the parking brake handle to move and actually ratchet more or less as intended.  That was a pretty big surprise as well given how rusty it was/is…