Rear brake auto adjusters

Today have been having a look at rear brakes as they have been pretty poor, scraping, grinding, and not appearing to do much.
It was well worthwhile as found a lot of rust on inside, and a spring missing from the passenger side wheel. Only issue I had was that on re-assembly handbrake would not uold, and as suspected when I opened drums again, the self adjsuters were still in their original slack condition as I left them on re-assembly, expecting them to take up with brake pedal which I depressed numerous times.
For now I have made the adjustment manually on the adjusters via the access hole in order to get decent clearance between drums and shoes. Anyone else had similar issues as I am now thinking I will have to manually adjust from time to time in the future.

Hello,

I've recently overhauled all of my brakes and have had similar problems with the adjusters.

This time, I cleaned them (the threads) with carb cleaner and lubricated them with a little silicon oil.

I found that the self adjustment now works better than it ever has before, but not totally perfectly..
It still requires a little manual "tweaking".. I can live with that though.

Bodge99

you can test them with drum off , get a helper in cab to operate brake while you watch . . . .warning make sure its a little push at a time as you dont want to go to far. . . .as the last thread, i have found a good clean sorts it

Thanks guys, I did clean the threads up to make sure they were nice and free as well as gears on ratchet, all appeared to be in good condition. I dont know if its the fact that they were completely slack that stopped them operating initially. Time will tell. If I have any problems I, ll take up mings suggestion and observe whats going on close up (with me visor on!!)

If it's the later model the metal adjuster lever can bend and stop adjusting.