rear brake woes...

so, my '86 xj700x has about 38k on the clock, and it's in dire need of some new brakes out back.

p.o. told me that he had replaced the rear shoes and that the drum was just worn out of spec. the adjustment rod is all the way in, and i still have to press the pedal all the way down to get little to no stopping power.

when i told him i was going to dig in and try to fix the problem myself, he told me i would need to replace the entire rear wheel, as it is an integral design. can anyone give me any confirmation to this?
i find it hard to believe that the engineers at yamaha would engineer such a fine machine, and then go soft on me with this design.

thanks, guys!

 

As far as I understand it that's the way it works. Although I have never heard of a drum wearing out of spec on theses bikes.

 

Unless of course the PO ran the shoes down to the metal backing plate and dug into the wheel/drum assembly.

 

Yeah, I dunno about that either; unless he ran it metal-on-metal and tore it up. I wouldn't believe a word, I'd look in there myself.

The brake drum IS part of the rear wheel, so if it is that bad it would need to be replaced, yes.

Not to panic, though... I needed an extra brake plate assembly and ended up getting an ENTIRE wheel assembly, with all the brake bits, for $19 off eBay. You should be able to find a wheel cheap IF NEED BE.

I'm still not buying it. Take a look and see for yourself.

 

It's much more likely that the lever is on the brake camshaft wrong.

I just put new drum brakes on an 1100 Shadow Saturday. The lever was WAY past the wear indicator and the adjustment nut was almost all the way up the rod.

When I tore into it I found that:

1 - The lever was misaligned on the camshaft by 1 spline (which makes lots of difference)

and

2 - The indicator had been forced on the camshaft in the wrong orientation.

The brake shoes were not discernible from the set that had just come out of the box.