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Old 12-29-2002, 09:51 AM
DanB98TJ DanB98TJ is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Tucson, AZ
Posts: 900
Angry Bizarre brake breakage

Fred (StealthTJ) and I ran Charouleau Gap yesterday - fun trail, but a little more difficult than usual thanks to wet/sandy rocks.....

After getting through the rough stuff, it felt like I had a rear brake grabbing. We had gone through some water not too far back and I figured the brakes might be wet, so I rode them lightly for a few yards to try and dry them out. When I hit the brakes again it felt like a wheel locked up and made a strange noise. Then the pedal went to the floor. After a couple pumps and I realized I had a serious problem - it felt like the pedal was disconnected from the master cylinder.

I lifted the hood and saw that the master cylinder reservoir was nearly empty. Once I walked around the Jeep it was pretty easy to see where all the fluid went - it was running out of the right rear drum. I could also see the rear shoe retaining pin hanging loose from the backing plate.

When we got the wheel and drum off I was pretty shocked. The backing plate was severely bent and ripped loose from the mounting bolts, one of the return springs mangled, one of the shoes bent, and the front piston had blown out of the wheel cylinder. Fred and I pulled all the parts off the backing plate, hammered the metal brake line closed and dumped in some fluid so we could get my Jeep back to pavement.

I'm really baffled about what happened, and have never seen anything like this before. When Fred did his rear disc conversion he gave me all the drum brake parts, so I have everything to fix it (except a new brake line), but would really like to know what caused this and hopefully never have it happen again. There was no indication that the axle seal or wheel cylinder was leaking and caused the brake to grab. Any ideas?

Apparently Webshots is being picky again and won't let me post a pic. Here is a link to a few shots:

http://community.webshots.com/album/58905922kiWryx
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