Before the Goat went to the blasters we had the brakes working pretty good. At some point while it was there one of the wheels apparently bled down and since I was in a hurry to get it painted before Muster there wasn't much time spent on them. I was able to move it around easy enough using the parking brake and moving as slow as I was around setting up at the event I just had to put the clutch in and it would stop. Since I had a couple of weeks between Muster and Temple I figured I'd take a closer look at things.
After being parked in the garage a couple of days it was easy to see that the left rear Wheel Cylinder was leaking. I've got 6 new WCs so thought it'd be easy enough to swap one out per day so as to not drain myself too bad and knocked that one out 1st. The old WC was a foreign job and had to have a reduction fitting between the line and the WC. The new ones are stamped USA and no reduction needed so was quick to swap in. Since the 1st one went so fast I went ahead and jumped onto the right rear but it still had full fluid pressure at it so I decided to just go with the one and see how well that worked.
Keith_J stopped by and helped me bleed the lines but, again, only needed at the left rear. I had both rear brake drums off at this point so we were really only looking at the shoe actuation and the fact that plenty of fluid was squirting (at good pressure) out of the bleeder.
That was all last Friday. Yesterday while I was reinstalling the drums I ran in to a bit of a problem with the right rear. The left rear wheel and drum were both off and the drum went on easy enough and then the wheel. On the right side I had just pulled the drum with the idea that I'd take the backing plate off, change the WC and then just reinstall everything. The problem came when trying to get the splines on the drum lined up with the splines on the axle shaft and not pushing the shaft back in the axle. There's a bolt in the center of the drum that screws into the center of the axle to keep everything connected. I spent about an hour trying to get splines lined up by using a longer bolt to hold the axle out while getting things to mesh. Try one spot, spin it a bit, try the next spot, spin it, try again. Just wouldn't go so I left it for today.
After trying the spin and spin again routine for a couple of trys I figured out one of the problems was the valve stem on the tire. I couldn't just spin it one spline as the ears on the drum would hang up on the stem so I was pulling it out past the stem and then spinning it. What I was doing was moving it 4 or 5 splines each time to clear. So, off came the wheel and back to spinning. This time it took about 3 tries to get it on.
The moral of the story, if there is one, don't waste time trying to save time. If I'd just pulled the wheel off to begin with everything would have been done in about 15 minutes yesterday instead of 1.5 hours between then and today.
For those saying I should just change all the WCs, well I now have 5 new spares and can likely rebuild the one I took off. If they're working fine I don't see the need to break into the system to fix what's working. As the Goat is still just being driven on and off a trailer and around areas at slow speed I'm not that concerned. All of the WCs were taken off and refurbed earlier (before I got the new ones) so I know they're in at least passable condition. When I get the new tires and decide I want to take it to the grocery store or out in traffic I might reconsider.
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