A LOT of Brake Parts!

[Jason Edge]

With the cadmium plating process I have accumulated quite a bit of cadmium plated brake parts and mapped out the rear brake hardware about a week ago, and and completed the front brake hardware yesterday.   The rear brake set ended up being 42 pieces (21 per side).  The front set includes a whopping 60 pieces (30 per side).   This is one of those parts sets where there is no half-way going about it ... you need full focus.  After going through this process I really want to go back over my brakes, but have a few other items on my car before I tackle brakes. The main thing is is I want to button some things up and get it off the wheel cribs and just drive it a bit.

With that and the fact I have been quiet here on the site lately, I thought I would share one of my parts related projects. Here are a few notes then a few pictures.

First, there are a lot of cad plated parts like the actuating lever & pawl, retainer cups pins, links, etc.  That is a no brainer. Cad plate them and make them look like new.

Second, there are the color code springs. Here, I will save as is if there is a sufficient amount of color paint left on them, but if they are rusty brown they get cad plated. Reason being, they end up looking like new and have a protective coating on them. 

Decoding the Springs when Color is not Present: Going through the process I learned an easy way to ID the springs by counting the number of "rings/coils" as follows:
5 Rings = Blue Spring
6 Rings = Red Spring
7 Rings - Yellow Springs

As far as placement, the shop manual indicates which spring goes in which location. When looking at the shop manual you will probably spend a lot of time looking at the front and rear brake illustration page.  A couple of things to keep in mind, is the picture is showing a right rear on left side, and a right front on right side. The caption can be a little misleading. Also, understand that the Primary Brake Shoe is always on the front, and opposite side of the actuating lever and pawl. this is important to understand when ready the spring location and other brake parts.

ABOVE: Complete 60 piece front brake hardware set with left front on left, and right front on right.  This was picture posted to my Facebook Parts page yesterday. 

ABOVE:  Here is a "Cheat Sheet" picture I took that was not posted. It shows the location of the colored springs on the right front brake.  You can see
- the "5 ring" blue spring that goes through actuating lever, stabilizer plated and secondary shoe on far left; - the "6 ring" red spring that goes through stabilizer plate and primary shoe on far right
- the two "7 ring" yellow springs that go through the stabilizer plates only 

ABOVE: Complete 42 piece rear brake hardware set with left rear on left, and right rear on right.  
Note: There was one mistake in this picture where I reversed a right side part for a left side. If you can spot it you are our Brake Expert for the day... and can have that Trivia Cigar!  After I saw it, I had already bagged the set so let it serve as the picture. 

ABOVE: This is another brake related cad fastener set I also just posted, the brake hose bracket fastener set. I included an "as pulled" example and set in the center to show the difference a little muriatic acid and cad plating can make!!

ABOVE: And here is the park brake hardware I shared a few weeks back. This is what got me started on grouping the cad plated brake stuff!

I have also been working on the first of two smaller parts buildings and trying to get ready for our biennial family reunion at the house next month! Always something going on!

[Jason Edge]

Last night I put 2 of these sets together side by side simultaneously for 2 customers… that’s 120 pieces! I am probably down to 1 or 2 sets before I start running out of certain parts. Time to move on to another parts sorting project.