brake shoes

Let's try an attitude adjustment. Drum brakes on the Toyota are designed like everything else on the car

- thoughtfully.

The drum rusts to the hub

Knowing this, spray some penetrating oil around the center prior to removal. Use 8mm x 1.25 bolts in the threaded holes provided, progressively tightening alternatively to remove the hub - same process as removing the front rotors. I found the bolts at the local hardware store for $1.60 each.

the painstaking star wheel adjuster mechanism

Just be careful. You remove one spring and one clip and the adjusting level fits over the rear brake shoe.

and parking brake

Just pull back the long spring covering the parking brake cable and hold the cable with pliers to reveal the cable end. If you unhook the spring from the automatic adjustment lever first, it will swing out of the way and you simply unhook the parking brake cable from the end of the rear brake shoe.

the wacky hold down spring and c-crimp washers,

All drum brakes have the same kind of hold down springs. There's a special tool that all the auto parts have for removing them in about two seconds. For installing them back, I found it easier to just push in and then turn the top washer with my thumb and finger.

let's

Brake shoe return spring (goes in those "C" shaped cutouts in the shoes. Use vice grip pliers and pushing in on the last shoe when hooking it into position), anchor spring (couldn't be much simpler - just hook one end to the hole at the bottom of each brake shoe), hold down springs (also easy to install - skip tool and use hand pressure, springs are light weight) auto adjust lever spring - just examine it very carefully to see the way it hooks together before disassembly. The end at the lever goes over, the other end goes under, and it goes in the hole directly in line with the other end.

squeaky friction points,

That's where you apply the brake grease. Not too difficult or much different than taking apart and lubricating the slide pins on the disk calipers.

measure the

You're supposed to use a vernier caliper. Auto parts stores sell digital versions these days for under $20. You could also just check the depth of wear at the ridge between the worn and adjacent portion of the drum. Read the spec. for the difference between new and maximum wear, and you can see the amount of wear permitted. I found minimal wear, would guesstimate .001 -.002" well within limits. If the shoes were worn down to the backing plate, I'd just replace the drums, or you could carry them into a shop to be machined, but then I replace the rotors also. The idea of brake systems is to dissipate heat, so I prefer to have more metal, not less.

who thought this stuff

Ever see the big wooden lever on a stage coach or buckboard wagon in old Westerns - that's the genesis of the idea. Drum brakes are practically as old as automobiles. Large trucks still use them. Properly maintained, the only real advantage of disk brakes is that they dry quicker if you've gone through a deep puddle, and if you're doing a lot of braking, they cool faster.

Ok, so they wear practically forever and aren't nearly as dusty, I'll

Because they wear practically forever, you might do them once during your ownership of the car. Just do it right, take your time, the basic principle is very simple. If you don't like doing brake work, just take them to a shop - they all do brakes. My problem is I don't trust shops to do anything on the car. Brake work is often something the inexperienced mechanics are given to learn, whereas if you have the service manual, and go carefully, you can wind up with a better job.

I have it kind of backwards. When I took Auto Shop in High School we only worked on drum brakes, so it is disk brakes that were new to me. They're both the same principle - converting the energy of motion into "kinetic atomic motion" in the cast iron disk, drum, and surrounding air, which "energy has spread out (in a diffused and non-directional form) to occupy all of the possible states of a system which can store it." So the 3,000 pound vehicle moving at sixty miles per hour, converts its energy into altering the vibrational states of the molecules in the iron.

============= Ever look at it closely? The teeth are actually curved, like the escapement mechanism in a mechanical clock. If the thread pitch is 1mm - apx. .040", and there are twenty teeth, turning one tooth would move the end apx. .002" Now if there were no self adjustment mechanism and it was necessary to manually adjust the brake shoes every time they wore .002", and you had to turn the adjuster tight into the drum and then back it off one tooth, I might agree with you that the drum brakes are an annoying anachronism, but actually they take care of themselves for 150,000 -

All these parts will still be cheaper than a disc brake with an integrated cable-actuated emergency brake. And yes, the self-servo effect makes it ideal in emergency systems. But cost is still a major consideration. Today, drum rear brakes are available as the system of choice on, uhhh...low end cars. ;)

Disc brakes were patented in 1901 by a British inventor Frederick William Lanchester. But the disc system's efficiency is mostly not needed and the higher pedal force needed to operate them was only overcome in 1964 with the introduction of Studebaker's power boost system.

camry-keeper wrote: