ClassicCar

The fronts are 2-1/4' wide, and the rears are 1-3/4' wide. a guy on eBay sells both sets. You can also have your current set relined, if the shoes are not damaged.

Walt, the front and back seem to be the same size, so what is different about them that makes them so they will not work, and what would I need to do to get the 263's to work--how do I adjust the anchor pin?

The car in question is a LWB Hornet Special Club Coupe, thus it has the 2-1/4" X 11 " drums in front and the 1-3/4" X 11 drums in the rear. What makes you think they are the same size front and rear? You need to measure them to be sure. The difference is that the drums in the back are 1/2" narrower than the fronts and thus the shoe and lining are 1/2" narrower than the fronts. Is it clear now? Also the wheel cylinders in the rear are 15/16" diameter bore, whereas the fronts are 1-1/8" bore.....this is because their is more weight on the front end than the rear, especially during braking when the weight transfers to the front. If the rear brakes were the same size as the fronts, they would lock up prematurely in hard braking, making the car skid sideways.

OK guys, this is what I did this morning. I took the original rear shoes and set them on a QMS and ran the dimentions on them. I had the machine draw out a blueprint of the original shoe. I then set up the new shoes (same as front) and machined them to the dimensions of the blueprint. The quality of the new shoes with respect to hole location, all the holes were there but the new shoes hole locations with respect to true position was as far as + - .030. This also included changing the width of the shoe to the 1/34" size. It was intresting that the bonded on pad was far from what we would call a good bonding job. Next we rounded up the drums and matched each one to the shoe set that was mounted. We rebuilt the wheel units including machining all of the mating surfaces, reassembled everything and run some friction tests. I think we are good to go... Thanks for all your input....