Saturday. A nice day for rear brakes.

Pulled off the remains of the rear brakes. Here it is down to those lovely tapered axles:

Time to clean up the backing plates--they were a mess. Here's what I took off that side:

That gunk is about an inch deep!

That's how I spent the majority of the day--cleaning up stuff. Installing the rear brakes was probably about an hour a side (I took my sweet time, and found that I really missed my nice set of drum brake tools that disappeared quite a few years ago.)

She cleaned up nicely. I fought the temptation to paint it--it has a nice patina to it and, well, this is going to be a driver, not a show car/trailer queen. So it'll soon be covered in grease and road grime again.

This is the "back" side.

Time to start putting it back together. Here's the front side of the backing plate in place.

 Next up, the rear axle seal. That's a felt washer inside that housing.

 

And here's the brakes starting to come together:

There's the completed assembly, right before I installed the drum. Now you'll note that there's an empty hole right about in the middle of front brake shoe--that's for a self adjusting mechanism that this car is supposed to be equipped with but the parts for it weren't there--it is missing on all 4 wheels.

Here's a pic--sorry for the low quality:

Numbers 8 & 9 are the missing bits

The car will operate just fine without these--and apparently did for a number of years--but will require manual adjustment of the brakes every so often. While this is simple enough, I'll probably try to source these eventually.

And here's the finished product:

I really need to polish those hubcaps

Tomorrow morning I'll adjust the passenger side (it is dragging quite a bit) then remove all the brake stuff from the front of the car. At least that's the plan for now--you never know, I might get stuck in my chair after hunkering down over those backing plates for a few hours.