The Underappreciated Drum Brake

General Discussion
1

Lets hear it for the under rated under appreciated drum brake! Lots of guys knock the drums and talk bad about them but heres what I say.

Drum brakes are better in my opinion because…

  1. drum brakes are smaller than disc brakes
  2. drum brakes don’t need a hydraulic system for activation though now they all are hydraulic.
  3. disc brakes at the rear axle of the car never reach their “self cleaning temperature”. So you have to change the brake pads of disc brakes quite more often than the brake pads of brake drums
  4. drum brakes are always dry, even if it’s raining (constant brake force)
  5. drum brakes are really simple
  6. no brake dust on wheels

But you say rick…

What about pedal feel?

Well drum brakes are self actuating so they have a great pedal feel. You need to adjust the drums so there is drag, if the wheel moves freely its too loose.

But drums are soooo heavy…

Drums are 3 times lighter than discs. Calipers are 4 times heavier than wheel cylinders, and the brake surface area of a drum brake shoe is 6 times larger than a disc pad.

But I like my cross drilled rotors…

There is a company that will drill your drums with all of the same benefits of disc brakes.

Well they just don’t last as long as discs…

I have got 50k miles on drums no problem, and if you need to get a few extra months out of a drum brake you can “trick” the adjuster and scrape by a while. or you can even rotate your shoes if the design allows sometimes getting an extra 10k miles from your shoes.

If drums are so great why dont big trucks use them?

Most big trucks use 4 wheel drums to this day.

What about mountains?

Downshift. That easy.

Relining shoes is an expensive propsition…

Well…Diy reline kits are an easy way to using the same brakes for a longer period of time. You can do the process yourself by buying an online brake relining kit or you can ask a technician to do the job for you. The process involves pulling the brake pads off the drum, and then covering the brake shoes with fresh friction material. Asbestos, wool or steel are commonly used to reline the old shoes, and most garages will buy the material in bulk to get a good deal. Internet-based relining kits are affordable too. OR I take my shoes to a shop that will reline them for a case of beer. They will use asbestoes also so they last longer.

If you get a disc brake too hot you will boil the fluid and warp the rotor, I have has a camaro barreling down a mountain pass standing on the brake pedal with smoke rolling out of the drums and once the cooled off they were as good as new. Try that with discs.

Heres to the drum brake! So lets give em a little respect.

2

Change shoes on a set of drum brakes.
Change pads on a set of disk brakes.
Tell me which you prefer.

3

Well thats another benefit, anyone with a hammer and a screwdriver can change pads, drum brakes ensure joe blow isnt fooling with the brakes. I had a friend that had a six pack in him and he was changing his rear shoes on a chrysler and he lost an eye when the spring got away from him.

4

@WheresRick

Asbestos has been PROVEN to cause cancer

5

Some of this (o.p.) is true, most is nonsense.
This comes from someone with drums on the rear of his car.
Drums do OK on the rear doing ~20% of the braking in moderate street driving.

Time to join the 21st century.

6

Modern drums are flimsy, in the good ol days drums were cast with fins for cooling and had some mass to them. They were just fine for normal driving. Now we put paper thin drums on cars with rubber band timing belts and paper thin metal. Give me an old 72 impala any day.

Now whats nonsense, lets debate.

7

Drum front brakes did very well for many years from the 1920s when front brakes were added into general use until around the 1970s when disk brakes were begun to be phased into use. I recall our first car with disk front brakes,a 1974 model. It’s interesting to recall that at first, disk brakes were more expensive than drum brakes to reline/repad although the task was simpler than with a drum brake. Being a DIY person whenever possible, I appreciate the ease of installing new pads compared to installing new shoes for drum brakes. Drum front brakes often resulted in a tendency to pull left or right when the brake pedal was pushed. This can happen with disk brakes as well but seemingly not as often.

A dual leading shoe drum front brake on a moderately powered motorcycle has been just fine for me. A disk brake is more appropriate for a very fast motorcycle.

The parts count and apparent assembly time would indicate a manufacturing cost advantage for a disk brake.

Even if everything else was equal, I would be happier with a disk brake for ease of pad replacement.

8

Drum brakes would fade under constant braking faster than disk brakes. Disk brakes recover more quickly as well. On some vehicles without power assist, it almost took two feet on the brake pedal to get the vehicle stopped. Power drum brakes on many vehicles were very touchy. I remember going from a non-power drum brake vehicle (a 1971 Ford Maverick) to a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass Salon with power disk brakes (drums on the rear wheels). The Oldsmobile was a much heavier vehicle, but could stop more quickly.

9

WheresRick:
If you asked for a discussion about the pros and cons of disk vs drum brakes, you would get lots of interesting discussion and input. Instead you put a stake in the ground for a one-sided position that is largely nonsense and impossible to defend.
Is that what you intended?

10

No Joe not at all, What happened was I was noticing all of the people complaining about warped disc brakes, well back when we still drove cars with drum brakes there was not many people who had problems with warped drums, I bombed around in a camaro for years with non power assisted drum brakes and it was fine. I was just upset that so many people blast drum brakes, i have fond memories of them. Im just saying lets give drum brakes a chance.

Everyone is tellming me of this “non sense” but no one can point it out to me, lets debate.

11

@JoeMario – I think WheresRick is a young person who wants to go back to the “good old days” from reading this post, his post asking about a comparison between a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice and a 1987 Dodge Diplomat, and his post which was critical of the Honda Civic. To this old geezer (I’m 71), the good old days weren’t so great. The simple carburetor on my 1950 Chevrolet pickup truck took me an afternoon to rebuild and adjust. Ignition points had to be replaced at 10,000 mile intervals on the vehicles of the 1950s through the early 1970s. The earlier cars with drum brakes didn’t stop as quickly as modern cars with disk brakes. Fuel injection has really improved fuel economy over carburetors and the fuel injected cars run much better. I like old cars, but I wouldn’t want one for daily transportation.

12

Well I am 45 years old, I got to experience some of the good ol days as I call them and they were glorious. I drove a 68 camaro for 15 years and i still have it. It made me a good car drum brakes and all. You cant go into autozone with a case of beer and get new disc brake pads, with my local garage i was able to do that, remember I drive a modern chevy truck, i just found the old cars to be better vehicles.

13

I had a 65 Chevelle a few years ago with non-power drum brakes all around, so yeah, I gave them a chance. I’m not sure which took longer, getting the car up to speed(2bbl 283 powerglide) or getting the car stopped in a reasonable distance(4 drum brakes). If I would have kept the car longer, I would have installed 4 power disc brakes on it.

My old Civic had drums in the rear, which was ok for a light car. My CX-7 has discs all around and I’m happy with them.

14

@WheresRick

“You can’t go into autozone with a case of beer and get new disc brake pads”

What does that mean?

15

I’ve got a few minutes, so here goes:

  1. drum brakes are smaller than disc brakes So what? Wheels are plenty big to contain either
  2. drum brakes don’t need a hydraulic system for activation though now they all are hydraulic. Again, so what? Mechanical drums would be a nightmare
  3. disc brakes at the rear axle of the car never reach their “self cleaning temperature”. So you have to change the brake pads of disc brakes quite more often than the brake pads of brake drums Incorrect, many cars with rear discs go 100k miles, more than most drums. I replaced my drum shoes much more often than my disc pads.
  4. drum brakes are always dry, even if it’s raining (constant brake force) Constant low brake force, and discs work fine in the rain. When drums do get wet, it takes MUCH longer to get them up to 100 percent.
  5. drum brakes are really simple Nope, many more parts than with discs.
  6. no brake dust on wheels OK, you get 1 out of 6.
16

WheresRick, I have been driving longer than you have been alive, and I have both used and replaced both kinds of brakes. You have a few misconceptions, but then so do some others here.

Non power drum brakes with a single master cylinder did the job quite well and were actually quite reliable. Considering the materials available at the time compared to today, they were probably more reliable. Many changes were made to make them more reliable for people who did not take care of their vehicles, but in my opinion, brakes still fail because people don’t take care of them, but now there are more things to cause those failures.

You had drum brakes on a Camaro, these brakes were quite large for that car, as most high performance cars have larger brakes than non HiPo vehicles. In most cars, drums did fade, but then so do disc brakes when they are overworked.

Back when brakes used asbestos, drum brakes could stop a car just as fast as todays disc brakes do. Its not the brakes that stop a car though, its the tires and todays tires are much better than the bias ply tires of the drum brake days.

The problem is that asbestos is no longer available. Brake shoes do not have the friction materials available to them today that is used on disc pads, such as ceramics. I don’t know what the potential of drums would be if they were, but todays drum brakes really suck at stopping a vehicle. In the all drum days, an application of the emergency brake would lock the rear wheels. Today they call it a parking brakes because as an emergency brake, it barely slows a vehicle down. I would not want an all drum vehicle today unless hey make better materials available.

BTW, I had a 57 Oldsmobile Super 88 with all drum, non power, single cylinder brakes and it did not need very much pedal pressure to haul that 4600 pound car down from 125 mph. Unfortunately I ruined more than a few tires doing that.

Drums do get wet and they don’t work when you go through a puddle unless you were taught to lightly apply the brakes to keep the water out. If you didn’t do that, you better not need to stop because you wont. Discs are superior in that area. also, I have gotten 140k out of a set of disc pads, most drum shoes were only good for about 25k.

17

All things being equal, a disc brake will deliver twice the stopping power with half the weight and a third the parts count. Disc brakes can be counted on for repeated high-speed stops without fade, where drums become virtually useless…My 1975 one ton Dodge truck uses disc brakes on the front…Airliners all use disc brakes…They simply perform better…

18

You forgot about the part where drum brakes overheat and fade much worse that disc brakes. I’ll keep my 4 piston Brembos.

19

From Tridag: Quote: “Drum brakes would fade under constant braking faster than disk brakes. The simple carburetor on my 1950 Chevrolet pickup truck took me an afternoon to rebuild and adjust. Ignition points had to be replaced at 10,000 mile intervals on the vehicles of the 1950s through the early 1970s” unquote

Dear Mr. Tridag, Drum brakes would, with no doubt, fade under a constantly applied situation such a going down a mountain without an occasional brake pedal release but being in the midwest flat or rolling country, brake fade was simply never a problem for me. Front drum brakes were good for around 50 years in general use and to condemn them now in extreme descriptive language is not appropriate. I’m glad that they are gone but they were not nearly as bad as you seem to want to say. If drum front brakes were as bad as you seem to want to say, then there would be a documented historical epidemic of people who crashed when going down a mountain. I don’t believe it was quite that way. A strong pedal application could easily lock the wheels with drum brakes.

If it took you an afternoon to rebuild a one barrel carburetor for a 1950 Chevy 6, then I would submit that either that was your first or else you were slow and methodical. A half of an afternoon might be more realistic. I too have owned cars with carburetors and ignition points. Points could last much longer than you state. When some would bring in a poorly running car with coil, point and condenser ignition to a gas station where I used to hang out, it was routine by repair people to simply install new points, condenser and plugs regardless of whether the old parts were still good as these parts were inexpensive compared to a comeback complaint.

20

@db4690 Well I was always able to go to my local place that relined shoes and gave them a 12 dollar case of beer and got my shoes relined. I though I mentioned this in my original post.

Try to get pads at autozone for a 12 dollar case of beer.