Quote:
Originally Posted by DieselPaul
(Post 3099331)
My 190SL has four wheel drums, I don't know how cougars are, but most people who dislike 190SL brakes have never driven one where they are set up properly. Are your front brakes all iron? On my car I've got aluminum drums with steel liners and aluminum shoes.
The manual steering is a bummer on my car as well, but luckily I have the a steering wheel from a cruise ship on my car, all the money Mercedes spent making steering wheels so large, they could have developed power steering.
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Yes, there were a few cars with superior drum brakes. The buicks of the late fifties and sixties had big finned aluminum drums with iron liners. They made the very best brakes for the front of a hot rod in the days before disc brakes. Do a quality turning on them and tru arc some quality shoes to fit them, and they were very impressive even if they were still on that land yacht Buick.
Getting rid of drums on the front made such a huge improvement that the makers found that they could get by with leaving the drums on the rear, because they had a minimal effect.
In the fifties when the mid level and high level cars, e.g, Buick, Olds, Cadillac, Mercury, Lincoln, etc. started getting really heavy, the drums really started being marginal. I remember my Dad ca. 1956 invested in a quality drum lathe and a TruArc machine. He would turn the drums and the use the TruArc machine to fit some quality shoes to the drums. If one were to simply use normal wear to make the shoes fit the drums, they would have hot spots and would not break in as effectively. He had a reputation in town as being someone who could do a really good brake job.
A few years back I was at a Friday night cruise where a young fellow had a well done rat rod. I made a comment about the Buick brakes on the front and he asked me how I knew that they were Buick brakes. I didn't really know how to answer the question. He said that they did work really well. Of course the car probably didn't weigh much more than 2,000 pounds.
Another set of superior drum brakes I remember were the ones I put on my '69 Roadrunner. These were relatively light cars with components meant for heavier cars. When it came brake time, a friend of mine at a local brake and alignment shop told me that he would make a set of great brakes for it for nothing.
I took him the drums and shoes. He took scraps of quality lining material and riveted them in place on the shoes in three sections per shoe with about a 1/2" between each section. He then turned the drums and Tru Arced the shoes to fit the drums. When I got it all back together I was amazed. Up until that point I had never owned a car with better brakes. I don't think I ever did until my new 240D in '77.
Like anything else, there are good and bad within the category. I still prefer disc brakes hands down, but there are some drums that are better than others.
