Mechanical Rear Brake

I'm curious about how you go about centering the shoes to the axle before turning. In other words, how do you set the position of the pivot stud?

Hi amklyde,
Plan –A- is to chuck up on the outside edge of the backing plate in a four jaw chuck while squaring out the backing plate to the face of the chuck. Then indicate in the axle sleeve. Once the backing plate is square to the chuck and the axle sleeve is running true I’ll set my indicator to the already mounted brake pads and bump them around until they are as true as possible then tighten the pivot screw. Then I’ll start it up and duck. I’ll take photo’s of that setup to share with everyone.

Plan –B- involves a 20” floor disk sander and a light touch.

Plan –A- worked out perfectly. Turned the pads to 7.985 and they now fit the drum great. The only difference from plan –A- was that I used 150rpm and .007 feed.
Here’s the setup I used.
Keep the pivot stud where you can get at it.


Nice sharp, zero radius tool.




Fitting the drum just to be sure.


A quick coat of paint and I'm finished.

Extra springs will do little/nothing towards the relief of brake chatter. Don't forget to champher the linings ends.
How difficult was it to indicate the sleeve in? Looks good.
Nice sprocket!

Indicating the sleeve in was easy enough using a button indicator. I’m fortunate that my axle sleeve fits snuggly into the backing plate. The time consuming part was squaring the face of the sleeve to the lathe. Squaring the backing plate to the chuck face was useless, so I put a straight edge across the face of the axle sleeve and indicated that in square and let the backing plate go where ever it wanted.

In the future, ANY decent automotive Repair Shop can fit your shoes in about 3 minutes for about $5-10 with the proper tool.

Those automotive shoe grinders can't be set offset so that your pads are concentric with the centerline with the axle.