Thread: Roadster Pickup gets new rear brakes

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Gee, what a day!!! started at 10:00 A.M.,armed with many boxes of parts, printed off pictures that people were kind enough to post for me from various forums, and a rather shoddy Haynes manual that cost me 20 bucks. First thing--how the heck to you get the wheel cylinder off a S10 rearend???? G.M. has come up with this perverted push-on snap ring thing, that pushes on to the back side of the wheel cylinder and sandwiches the backing plate between the wheel cylinder and the snap ring thing. Only trouble is, you can't get the damn things off without removing the backing plate. The backing plate is held onto the axle tube flange with one big mother of a bolt / shoe rest at the top, and two 1/4" diameter bolts at the bottom, which immediately twist off when you try to remove them. Then you can't get the backing plate out of the way to drill them out and tap new ones, because the inner axle flange won't let you get the backing plate off. At this point, the torch comes out and makes short but messy work of the twisted off bolts. After much thrashing and speaking of fluent curse, the new wheel cylinder gets installed, and backing plate re-anchored, with bolts and nuts this time. The new Lokar E-brake cable is installed in the e-brake arm, and it looks kinda like it might fall out of the slot, but hey, if it worked for G.M., it should work for me.... Finally everything is back together and it looks great---but wait---whats this???? why is the end of the E-brake cable not attached to anything??? Tear everything apart, take the E-brake as provided by G.M. off, weld up the stupid slot so that now its a real hole, not a slot. Take the Lokar E-brake cable, thread it thru the hole in the arm, then reassemble everything again (I'm still on the drivers side wheel I started on)----but wait---the round washer type thing with the slot in it that fits over the "nail" thru the backing plate wont go back on!!! Screw around with it for hour and a half, then go up to Local tool supplier and buy tool especially made to do that with (friggin pinchers worked the first time around)----wife comes out to garage at 5:30 and calls me for dinner---Sorry wife----to damn busy to eat. Go to passenger side wheel---smarter this time---don't remove backing plate---pry and torture old wheel cylinder untill I get it off. Then build a special tool, actually a peice of thin wall pipe that fits thru the cast hole in the back of the axle tube flange, with a short peice of flat bar welded to one end. Put new wheel cylinder on from one side, push stupid retaining ring thru from other side, set open end of "special tool" against stupid retaining ring, and get my humungous C-clamp out and pull everything together. It works--wheel cylinder is not real snug, wiggles a bit, but I assume that G.M. planned it like this. If I designed such asinine things in my engineering business, I wouldn't have any customers left. Finally at 7:00 P.M., I'm finished. I have 2 little external snap rings left over, that look like they would fit something about 1/4" diameter, but never did see anything that they would actually fit on. What a fun day.

Originally posted by brianrupnow
Gee, what a day!!! started at 10:00 A.M.,armed with many boxes of parts, printed off pictures that people were kind enough to post for me from various forums, and a rather shoddy Haynes manual that cost me 20 bucks. First thing--how the heck to you get the wheel cylinder off a S10 rearend???? G.M. has come up with this perverted push-on snap ring thing, that pushes on to the back side of the wheel cylinder and sandwiches the backing plate between the wheel cylinder and the snap ring thing. Only trouble is, you can't get the damn things off without removing the backing plate. The backing plate is held onto the axle tube flange with one big mother of a bolt / shoe rest at the top, and two 1/4" diameter bolts at the bottom, which immediately twist off when you try to remove them. Then you can't get the backing plate out of the way to drill them out and tap new ones, because the inner axle flange won't let you get the backing plate off. At this point, the torch comes out and makes short but messy work of the twisted off bolts. After much thrashing and speaking of fluent curse, the new wheel cylinder gets installed, and backing plate re-anchored, with bolts and nuts this time. The new Lokar E-brake cable is installed in the e-brake arm, and it looks kinda like it might fall out of the slot, but hey, if it worked for G.M., it should work for me.... Finally everything is back together and it looks great---but wait---whats this???? why is the end of the E-brake cable not attached to anything??? Tear everything apart, take the E-brake as provided by G.M. off, weld up the stupid slot so that now its a real hole, not a slot. Take the Lokar E-brake cable, thread it thru the hole in the arm, then reassemble everything again (I'm still on the drivers side wheel I started on)----but wait---the round washer type thing with the slot in it that fits over the "nail" thru the backing plate wont go back on!!! Screw around with it for hour and a half, then go up to Local tool supplier and buy tool especially made to do that with (friggin pinchers worked the first time around)----wife comes out to garage at 5:30 and calls me for dinner---Sorry wife----to damn busy to eat. Go to passenger side wheel---smarter this time---don't remove backing plate---pry and torture old wheel cylinder untill I get it off. Then build a special tool, actually a peice of thin wall pipe that fits thru the cast hole in the back of the axle tube flange, with a short peice of flat bar welded to one end. Put new wheel cylinder on from one side, push stupid retaining ring thru from other side, set open end of "special tool" against stupid retaining ring, and get my humungous C-clamp out and pull everything together. It works--wheel cylinder is not real snug, wiggles a bit, but I assume that G.M. planned it like this. If I designed such asinine things in my engineering business, I wouldn't have any customers left. Finally at 7:00 P.M., I'm finished. I have 2 little external snap rings left over, that look like they would fit something about 1/4" diameter, but never did see anything that they would actually fit on. What a fun day.

welcome to my world.

Dang!! Nothing like building a rear end from scratch!! Well done Brianrupnow1