Well i guess there has to be one. I for one love the 4 wheel drums on my Comet.I don't have any trouble stopping the car from 100 plus mph at the Drag strip and they have the best pedal feel out of all my vehicles. I used 5 bolt v8 drums and backing plates from a 73 Maverick,along with the proportioning valve,bought a new manual master cylinder also for a v8 car and obviously all new brake and flex lines. The rears are standard Ford 10''x2'' drums and shoes I will agree with most of the complaints about brake fade and such,but too many little parts?? come on.If you can't change a set of front shoes nearly as fast as a set of disc pads mabee you shoulden't be touching brakes at all. Most of the time i find that the problem with drum brakes is that the shoes don't fit the arc of the drum very well.You can actually set the shoe in the drum and it will rock in the center rather than fit nice and tight.Then this is where it can become a little time consuming sanding the shoes to fit. I don't know unless a complete disc swap fell in my lap for next to nothing or i started making alot more power i can't see me making the change over to disc.
I haven't really cracked open the drums to fiddle with them yet since I had to move my Mavericks to my parents house when I moved- Hence I can't just walk outside to see them whenever I want. I might just be overworrying about the parts. Either way it seems I'm going to have to really beef up on my drum maintenance skills until I can get any parts together to switch them. Who knows? I might have a knack for dealing with drum brakes.
Drums are not difficult to maintain/change...Proper tools and doing one wheel at a time is all it takes.Get a hold down spring removal tool and a good old fashioned "brake wrench" and you will have the tools...then you just need the parts and the time...
That is part of the problem with drum brakes for most people. They dont want to crawl under and spin the adjustors, (heck I have a hard enough time getting my wife to tell me when her car is ready for an oil change). I guess alot of the reason I switched is due to a matter of convinence, I didnt want to have to worry about adjusting them. But in the same respect and more importantly my wife drives my car every now and then and I dont want to have to worry about her wrapping it around a tree because the brakes act different then the ones on her explorer. There is a reason why she has only driven my old truck once and trust me It scared me probably worse then it scared her. Another thing that should be noted, if you dont know what you are doing then you can screw something up pretty easily. I hate to say it but if you dont know how to do it right and dont have anyone else to help you do it right you can take all the time in the world and still not get them working to what they should be. So you might want to take it into a reputable shop and have them adjust the brakes in if you retain the drums, of course that can go one way or the other too, my little brother has a 74 with a 3 on the tree he took it in to get an alignment done and none of the techs knew how to move the car...The first one thought it was an standard converted to an automatic and about killed himself, the car, and the car parked behind it when he turned the key without depressing the clutch...these older cars are falling out of the relm of common service and alot of the stuff on them is just not seen anymore, so alot of these guys cant do anything with it.
Kids today makes me feel old and I'm really not. Back to the subject...my '74 has manual drums. It's the first car I've had with such. The car does stop, you just have to be serious when you step on the pedal and realize is not a little Japanese car. It does pull sometimes and I just expect it to do so, and I know "panic stop" isn't in the car's vocabulary. I will eventually put discs on the front if not all the way around. I just have to be careful because I drive 2 other cars on regular basis with different brake set ups. The key is to know the limits of your ride and drive like you're the invisible man!
Ok now we're really getting old school. You could always re arch the shoes to fit the drums. Havent seen one of those machines since high school. Dont think they had much concern for health and safety back then.
I naturally push hard on the brakes anyway. I'm 6' 3" so I have a natural leverage advantage. Plus my old work car was so small it didn't have power anything. Honestly, my new daily driver is a '97 and the transition to power steering and brakes has been really tough. I still don't like the feel of the car.
Haha so i'm not the only one who has seen one of those machines A local machine shop here has one and when i was working as a Forklift Mechanic i got all the shoes arced by him.Now theres a test of drum brakes only 2 wheels stopping a 10,000 lb machine.
