How to inspect the front brake drums on a VW Beetle
(00:00) Welcome to Just Kampers. In this video, I'm going to carry out a front brake drum inspection on a 1967 Beetle. So let's get to it so first thing I need to do is remove the hubc caps and what's really cool is this this is the hubcap puller stored in the jacking point off with the Hub Gap perfect let's crack the wheel belts off okay okay let's get it in the air so next I'm going to De adjust the brake shoes so I can remove the drum once I've got the wheel bearing undone obviously so at this stage I'm going to use my torch and the correct tool again
(00:48) this is the correct brake adjusting tool cuz it's actually softer than a screwdriver a Harden tip of a screwdriver will do severe damage to the soft Adjusters in here so I'm using the correct tool and a torch I can see what I'm doing doing and I'm going to find the adjuster which is here at the front there he is and then I'm going to wind him off so just flicking around with the tool and these are on a standard thread these adjusters I'm actually winding the adjuster up the thread which actually draws the adjuster back down on the top
(01:22) half and on the bottom we're doing the same we're winding it towards the bottom this time which actually brings the shoes in and then I'll go through adjustment when we're put them back together so that's some de adjusted they're not touching the drum anymore so next is to get our grease cap off this has obviously got the speedo coming through the grease cap so there's a little e-clip that holds the speedo Cable in so we're going to remove the e-clip first and then take our grease cap off so let's just gently
(01:49) prise that e clip off we don't want to lose him just gently pull him off with our little screwdriver can be a little bit fiddly there he goes and I'll put them to one side for refitting next I'm going to remove our grease cap I'm going to use a lever bar and just gently prize it off obviously going to stand out the way cuz I don't want to hit myself in the face just a little gentle tap that way it start to move already so nice and nice and easy you can use a block of wood and a hammer um put a block of wood through here on the side and just tap it
(02:18) off either way we don't want to damage the grease cap so whatever you do be gentle there we go off now I can take the 6 mil Allen key and undo the lock bolt for the wheel bearing adjustment let's undo that and use a pair of pliers this is left hand thread so I'm going to rotate clockwise to actually loosen the bearing cuz this is the near side front so it's on a left hand thread for the wheel bearing remove that now I can slide the drum off taking care not to drop our wheel bearing and washer so I'm going to put my thumbs
(02:52) either side and that will help contain the bearing off we come just wipe the old grease off of the stub axle here lovely and then what I'm going to do is clean down with some brake cleaner I've got a catch tray underneath so let's give it a clean down with some brake cleaner we can now check our flexible brake hose also just for condition make sure it's not perished and we haven't got any cracks looks good and make sure that there's no kinks in it and it sits naturally and we haven't got any leaks around the connection here on the hard
(03:26) pipe either also we can check the manufacturing date on this pipe type cuz they're all printed on these rubber hoses the manufacturing date on this is 2022 excellent so we know our brake hoses are good for another six or seven years yeah so now that we've cleaned down our brake shoes I'll start the inspection the first thing that I look at is the actual friction material on the brake shoes themselves and make sure one that it's not delaminating off of the body of the shoe and also that our our material is even all the way around
(03:55) so I've got a lovely even thickness there we've still got plenty of thickness of material left the same on the bottom so that's good our shoes are working evenly next I actually check the lineing contact so looking at the top I can see that the friction lining is touching the whole of the brake drum itself so we've got a good frictional contact and that's on both shoes if we only had part contact UM there could either be uh a shape in the drum or the drums worn unevenly and we put new shoes on so this is good across the whole
(04:26) width of the shoe and the whole length of the shoe next I'm going to check the wheels cylinder so I've got a small screwdriver I'm just going to peel back the rubber Dust Boot and just make sure that it's dry in here we haven't got any brake fluid leaking out between the piston and the body so that's good I'll check the other side too pop that back on yep it's good nice and dry in there also we haven't got any splits on our boots at all so they're in good condition so that's cool next thing I'm going to do is just make sure that our
(04:54) wheel cylinder moves so we've got a prop fitted between our seat and our brake pedal and I've got the brake pedal about half travel and what that's done is expanded our wheel cylinder and now I can just check that both sides of the wheel cylinder move by using the lever bar gently on the brake shoes as you can see both sides of our wheel cylinder are moving so we've got no seizure there so that's all good so I can go ahead and remove the prop as you can see there's the prop I'm going to remove it now if you haven't got a prop you can have
(05:23) somebody in and help you and just go half travel on the brake pedal next I can check our adjusters are free and they move well now so with just a little bit of pressure flip that round using the correct tool obviously not a screwdriver and this allow the adjuster to come up I can put a little bit of copper grease on that so we've got a little bit of lubricant on that thread so again we've got good movement there the Locking uh spring is coming back in and locking in as well so that's good sometimes these rot off and get
(05:58) broken or get get bent too far as well so that's working fine I'll do the same for the bottom part of that adjuster in a moment next I'm going to deglaze the brake shoe and what I mean by Del glaze is to remove this shiny surface so I've got a 180 grit sandpaper and I'm just going to really gently not putting much pressure on at all uh all I'm doing is just taking that surface off so we can bed a nice fresh surface to our drum that's good also I just want to take this Edge down here make sure we've got a nice rounded Edge on the edge of the
(06:37) shoe uh so we definitely haven't got any binding of a sharp edge on our drum so that's that one I'll do the bottom as well to check the condition of the return springs for the shoes uh this one here the big heavy one next to the wheel cylinder is obviously the biggest one uh cuz it has to return the wheel cylinder back to its stop position and push the force back against the master cylinder so we basically we look at it and we're looking for uh anything uneven so the coils are nice and even they're not stretched and distorted there's no
(07:07) corrosion on it the ears that go around the brake shoes are in good Nick and it feels quite tight the same with this side on the smaller one um all looks good the coils are nice and tight and not distorted and out of place next we're going to move the brake shoes over and just put a bit of brake um bit of copper grease on the where the brake shoe touches the wheel cylinder and also where the brake shoe touches our brake adjust you can also put a little bit of copper grease on where the brake shoe touches the backing plate let me show you if I
(07:44) just move that out the way moving forward this area here is where the brake shoe rides against on the backing plate now a small amount of copper grease on here is good we have to be super careful cuz we do not want any copper grease on the actual brake friction line in itself so I'm just going to put a tiny weeny bit in there careful not to get any on the shoe itself we can just gently move that back there we go got a little bit of lubricant on the actual shoe body and the backing plate I'm happy with the condition of
(08:21) our brakes here we need to have a look at the brake drum now so let's go over to the bench and check it out remove the bearing out the front so that's the in with the washer and pop that on a clean bit of rag we've got here now I can now turn the drum over and just do a quick inspection and see what we got condition wise inside the drum so we're can to turn it over and have a look again with a clean rag I can just give it a wi round so what we're looking for we're looking for fractures we're looking for unevenness also wear and tear uh
(08:54) corrosion if the vehicle's been stood for a while and mainly we're looking at the condition of this lip on here on the edge always builds up a bit of a li lip on the Outer Edge if it's a really deep lip what that means is that the the drum itself the material is worn away this still feels quite good it's a little bit of corrosion there nothing serious but the rest of the actual um breaking face looks really really good so we're just going to take a little bit of 80 grit to this outer very outer edge here as we we don't want this High cuz
(09:23) trying to put it over our brake shoes could be a bit difficult so we're just going to literally take the Frozen the edges off here again we don't want to go across this face too much so just gently do that feels good also while we're here we can check out the the bearing at the back so the grease seal looks good we haven't had any grease going past the grease seal uh the grease in there still looks quite good it's not been flung out everywhere and overheated now we can pop our drum back on so just gently slide that back and make sure our
(09:55) bearing and our washer doesn't fall out of the front seat the rear bearing and then we can put our um knut back on the front and we're just going to do it up gently to start with and going to adjust it properly once we've got our wheel on on with the nut just going to remember this is left hand thread so it's almost like we're undoing it to tighten it up so we're using our flat GW fliers we're just going to take that nut up until it seats both bearings so again not too tight but tight enough to seat everything squeeze
(10:29) the grease out the bearings and we're going to back it off and then just gently with a very small amount of pressure just nip it up and leave it at that now I'm going to do the pinch bolt up nip that up doesn't have to go really tight but I just don't want that moving yet now I can move our drum and we can adjust our Brak shoes next so that's our next job using our special brake adjuster tool I'm now going to adjust the brake adjuster and all the way up and that will Jam our brake shoe against the brake drum and then back it off a couple
(10:57) of clicks then do the same for the bottom one and then I'm going to go in and pump the brake pedal and that will reenter our brake shoes and then we can readjust again and get it perfect plus that's wound right up and now our shoes against the drum two clicks off one two that should be enough to move it yeah that's fine let's do the same on the bottom I locked it up again backs that off two little clicks two allows us to move it now I can PR pump the brake pedal and Center those shoes I've pressed the brake pedal
(11:34) to Center our shoes obviously I've made sure that I had the drums on at that point if you doing both front drums for instance and have them both off you do the process so that both drums would be on you'd adjust them up to that point and then press the brake pedal you don't want to be pushing your brake pedal with one drum off cuz it wouldn't work you'd end up popping a wheel cylinder anyway we're there so we're going to adjust this now again I'm going to wind it right the way up until it locks and then back it off two
(12:02) clicks again careful make sure I only do two clicks one two the same on the bottom again I'm going to wind it up until it locks the drum so and then back that off two clicks Although our brake drum moves now it's still too draggy so we've still got too much drag from the brake shoot against the brake drum so I need to knock the adjuster off a little bit more so I'm going to start with the top one and just knock it back one so remember I'm loosening it not tightening it and I'm going one full click so move our wheel around and then the spring sits in
(12:42) the right position the little spring lug yes and all of a sudden that feels much better you say it does spin to a stop so we've got a small amount of drag which is what we want so we get good adjustment otherwise again if we had our shoes too loose then you'd have a lot pedal travel before anything happen and we need both fronts to be even also otherwise you could have one coming on before the other one so you'd end up with brake drag that way around so I'm happy with that this that's this side adjusted so I'm going to go ahead and
(13:13) finish the other side too just for reference the hubnut this side is a standard thread so it's a right hand thread not a left hand and this is on the off side of the vehicle whilst we have our road wheels off it's a great opportunity to check the condition of our suspension components so with our wheel fitted back on the last last check I can do before I put our grease cap on is just double check that wheel bearing adjustment so all I need to do now is just check the top to bottom play while we're here that feels just right so there's a
(13:42) tiny amount of play in that bearing now if I had to replaced a bearing and put a brand new wheel bearing in I would have done it up the same manner but I would have just taken all of that play out so when the bearing settled in you would have a little bit of play left but because we didn't replace it this was original bearing a little bit of play is absolutely perfect perfect we can now go ahead and fully tighten our pinch bolt on our hubnut then we can refit our grease cap make sure that we get our Speedo cable
(14:08) to come through and put our e-clip back on then just gently squeeze them on with a pair of pliers job done Al so don't forget to talk your wheel BS let's not foret get the hubc cap tool that can go back into the jacking Point that's our brake inspection completed you should inspect the front brakes at every service interval and the rear every other be sure to follow us on YouTube Facebook and Instagram and check us out at Just Kampers.
(14:47) com so until next time thanks for watching
