Brakes! - Damn Brakes!

One thing I loved about the Sj was its all round disc brake conversion. This meant that I no longer had to mess around cleaning out brake drums.

I new that the Jimny would be a return to basics in terms of the brakes but I did not think I would be fixing them in the first month!.

The handbrake was not effective and I decided to clean out the drums and adjust. The first problem was the wheels themselves, they had been torqued up to an unbelievable level as were the nuts on the spacers - quite un-necessary. The picture below shows the drum with the wheel spacer still in position. I had to WD40 and then heat the nuts in order to remove the spacer. As you can see I have managed to remove a couple of the wheel nuts at this stage.

Once I finally got the drivers side drum off it was, as expected, full of mud - but worse still the adjuster was jammed. So it became a complete rebuild

Not only were both adjusters jammed but they are a lot less accessible that the SJ ones. The larger flange restricts access to the brake parts.

It took a lot of cursing to get them re-assembled.

Whilst it was in bits I noticed that I had another "well-known" lifted Jimny problem:

Yes - the rear springs and shock absorbers get a bit close together! I understand that there is a fix for this problem which I will have to look into.

Since writing this article Andy Whalley has sent me a couple of pictures of his modification to sort the brakes problems. He has drilled a few holes in the bottom of the brake backing plate that permits the gunge to drain out whilst it is still wet. The holes are higlighted in white paint. I have not tried this yet but it is interesting as it is similar to an idea I have to fit a small nozzle from a Hozelock Greenhouse watering system into the top of the drum. These nozzles are small and produce a fine spray. I think that fitting one of these into the top of each drum backing plate and drilling the holes in the bottom will enable me to spray water around the inside of the drum without taking it to bits every time.  Conceivably it might even be possible to fit a washer jet motor and pipework to the drums to have an "electric brake wash".