My car failed the MOT yesterday on a poor performing rear brake.
I've taken it apart today, but cannot see anything wrong with it, apart from the drum had an awful lot of dust in it - far more than I've ever seen before.
Anyway, I gave it a clean up, tested it with the hand and foot brake, and the shoes move freely with both. Could it just be a case of the dust causing the poor performance? Thanks.
Possible, but I'd be looking at the self-adjuster first of all. Might also be worth measuring the drum diameter.
was the poor performance on both foot and hand brake operation? If yes, then maybe it was just dust. Test it by putting the hand brake on and trying to turn the wheel by hand, if you can then there is still a problem. On rare occasions I have found that a swap of rear drums left to right can improve things when nothing is obviously wrong. Very glazed shoes can give low performance when all else seems OK
Poor performance is often cause by a build up of friction in the cables and linkages over the years.
Yes, hand and foot brake were giving poor performance on one wheel. Testing by trying to turn it by hand, and it's solid now. All linkages / cables etc were free, the shoes are around a year old, so I reckon there was a years worth of dust in there - I'll be checking the other side now. Thanks.
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