Lumina (drum) brakes

[jeffcoslacker]

You know, I'm not alone it seems in feeling that the car ('97) could have better brakes, I've seen others comment that their's felt a little underachieving in the stopping dept.

Brakes last me a LONG time. I don't use them much. And when I do, I use them with authority, I don't do long, drawn out stops. Brakes are for stopping, that's how I've always looked at it. If you need to scrub speed to take a curve, or turn a corner, etc, if you have to use your brakes, you entered it too fast.

With some anticipation of what's happening in front of you, and better use of the car's natural off-throttle decelleration, you can save a lot of brake pads, gas, and wear and tear on your car. Plus getting out of the "pack mentality" of most drivers, who tend to bunch up and have to constantly react to each other rather than driving their own path, leaves you with a better field of view, more time to assess what's happening around you, and more options if a sudden reaction is required.

Ok, off the soapbox, back to the point. When I put the first set of front pads on at 70,000, I checked the rears too. They looked new. Unusual, but given the life I got from the front, not totally unexpected.

A couple of weeks ago I rotated the tires, and decided to have a look at the rears again (122,000 now), and they STILL look new.

OK, that's just not right. It's not using them nearly hard enough. I tried to adjust them up a bit, and found the adjuster wheels to be pretty well locked. I took them off and disassembled them, and found that there didn't appear to be the usual residue of lube/anti-seize compund that is usually put on them when assembled.

I applied some, and re-assembled the brakes and adjusted them properly. I GOT BRAKES NOW, JACK. Good brakes. Better than it had when new brakes.

I'm really glad to have found this problem. I have always wondered why the brakes on this car felt so inadequate. They worked OK for normal driving, but in some special circumstances, like if traffic suddenly came to a screeching halt on the highway, I could feel the fronts starting to fade near the end of the stop, and had me scouting for an escape route because I thought I might not get it to a stop before the back end of the next car.

I took it out on a deserted road I use for "testing" purposes last night, and ran it up to 90 mph and did a good hard "stand up on the brake paedal and activate the ABS" panic stop. Braking was agressive, predictable, fade free and much shorter than ever before.

I've never really had a problem like this on other cars, I mean I've had some with poorly adjusted rears, but your pedal was so low, you could tell what was causing it. And the e-brake is usually pretty ineffective when that happens. My pedal was fine, and the e-brake was functional. I used it at least a couple of times a week with the intent of keeping those adjusters free, but apparently it didn't help.

While the e-brake travel changed only slightly since fixing, it works much better. Before it would hold the car firmly in forward gear but you could overrun it and make the car move in reverse, if you tried. Now it's like an anchor, not gonna go anywhere in either direction, no matter how hard I try.

[maxwedge]

Jeff, interesting found the same thing on my 97 Lumina, fixed it the same way, also resurfaced the drums to get the lip off. I now have a 98 LTZ 3800, with 4w discs, the rear are a constant torture, locking up brake cables, once a year cleaning up the sliders, also ways frozen on the fixed pin, of course I live in upstate NY, so you know the deal!