Autozone Brake Shoes & Hardware kit

[steelerguy]

Has anybody else had bad luck with Autozone shoes & hardware?

Have a 99 Durango, 5.9 with 4wd. About 2 weeks ago, I changed my rear shoes & hardware, as well as the drums. I thought everything looked good. Bought the lifetime guaranteed & hardware kit from Autozone. Got Raybestos drums from JC Whitney.

Changed one side at a time & followed the Haynes manual exactly. The only thing that made me a little nervous was that the 2 top springs ended up being installed in a different order than the original installation. But this was exactly what the Haynes manual instructed & it was supported with a picture.

After a couple days, I started getting light shaking from the rear. It got progressively worse & could be be duplicated exactly by stopping or slowing the truck with the parking brake only. This means the problem is in the rear as that's all the parking brake actuates.

Anyway, I pulled the drums last night & saw that the rear rod on the passenger-side cylinder had slipped behind the 2-week old shoe & that was apparently causing my problem. No problem on the driver side.

I pulled the top 2 springs & manual adjuster. repositioned everything & reattached the everything. Haven't done a ton of rear brakes, so I compared everything to the good side & all looked fine.

Put everything back together & test drove it...all light braking. I got 1 or 2 series of shaking, not quite as bad as before. Stopped it in reverse a couple of time & that made it even better. Within 5 minutes there was no shaking & seemed to drive normally. Drove & stopped at 10-50 mph for 10 more minutes & was like new.

Drove to work this morning & after about 10 miles (5 at highway speed) the bad shaking has returned. Apparently, one or more cylinder rods is off again.

Don't see any leaks from the cylinders. Did not check the cylinder mounting bolts (Doh!!!) but I've never heard of them coming loose on their own when they've never been changed.

I'm thinking of replacing the whole shootin' match after checking the mounting bolts with either Carquest or Napa parts.

What do you think?

[mizzoudude1]

I have had nothing but bad experiences with Autozone's brake parts and will never buy anything from them again. I have an Acura Legend that I changed brakes on about a year ago and the front pads are all ready about 80% worn and have scored up my front rotor's which I just replaced at the same time. And you guessed it I bought them from Autozone. We have O'Riely's here in Oklahoma and they sell manufacture spec parts so I buy everything from them even if they are a little more expensive. In the long run you can pay more now or pay even more later.

[wafrederick]

AutoZone is really called AutoJunk or AutoGarbage.All they sell is really cheap auto parts you have to replace a lot of times.Go to Carquest,Napa,Auto Value and otherparts stores that sell high quality brake parts.My father gets brake parts from Auto Value that are high quality and do last a lot longer.

[steelerguy]

This ended up being fixed by having the badly out-of-round brake drums machined by a local car shop: American Auto Lube & Repair at the SEC of Guadalupe & Cooper in Gilbert, AZ. 480-539-4086. They did the whole job for $43 & it took over an hour.

I know that I could probably taken the drums back to Checker where they were purchased 2 weeks before, but I did not trust them to get it right. They actually started this mess in the first place by screwing up my original equipment drum with a routine turn.

The drums I got from RockAuto.com were also bad. The owner at American Lube & Repair said that he would buy any critical parts at NAPA or CarQuest.