Alrighty, to get to the point. There is 2 brake shoe options for my truck. 2.52 inch and 3.02 inch. Last time at autozone I purchased the 3.02 inch and when measure against the old ones (the owner before me had installed). They were a perfect match. But when I tried installing them, in no way was the drum fitting around them. At this point with me being about 45 minutes from any civilization and family (based on where I live). I literally had to take a file and file them down until I could literally kick and shove the drums on by force. So in short my question is were my drums actually 3.02 inch? Possible the previous owner had the same issue? Possible AutoZone defect?. Is there any proper way to tell the correct size if someone had installed the wrong.

Vehicle: 1993 Ford F250, 351W, Extended cab longbed. RWD. 8800GVWR.

 

almost sounds as if your shoes were adjusted out too far?

I'm no break expert but I would think if they were too wide for the drum, once you bolted the wheel on, the drum would not turn. As the shoe would be wedged between the backing plate and the drum?

What part of the shoe did you have to file?

 

Trust me, that is one of the many things I checked during installation. I had to file the entire top portion of the pads of the shoes. Also upon looking at the reviews on shoes on the autozone website. It appears this is a common occurrence. So more than likely it was a defective shoe.
https://www.autozone.com/brakes-and-...358/351718_0_0

 

3" vs 2.5" is the width of the shoe and has nothing to do with the thickness of friction material. Both sizes will fit inside a 3" drum but only a 2.5" shoe will fit in a 2.5" drum.
Was there a lip on the drum at all?
Was the star adjuster fully retracted before the new shoes were installed?
Are you aware there is a leading and a trailing shoe? The leading shoe has less friction material on it.
If you had a problem with only one side of the vehicle there is a good possibility you installed both leading shoes on one side and both trailing shoes on the other.

 

This is unfortunately an all too common issue these days. As they said, it's nothing to do with what width drum/shoe yours has, but how poorly manufactured the parts are.
I've had this issue with drum shoes AND disc pads both. In four cases taking the parts back resolved the issue when we went through all the available boxes and found some that had thinner friction surfaces.
In one case with disc pads we were not able to get thinner ones right then and there, so took them back and sanded them down using a flat surface and some coarse sandpaper.

With disc brakes it's the same scenario as drums, where you can't even install them. Get them into the caliper, sure no problem since the base metal is the correct shape and size. But try to put them over the rotor? Not so much...
Just like you not being able to put the drums on, the calipers could not be installed.

With shoes you don't so easily file them down, as you found. Sure you can do it, but it's a pain and it's not always within everyone's skill level to get them reasonable curved. In the old days there were plenty of shops around that could turn your drums AND turn your shoes down to match. I bet most of them have been gone a long time now though. I think we only have one left around here. Problem is it costs multiple times as much to have work done on them as it costs to buy new product. So service goes away and we can only buy parts and hope they're correct.
Too often they're not...

Good luck. Maybe we should post up the correct measurements as provided by the manufacturer, then take our calipers with us every time to measure the thickness before we get out of the store!

paul

 

I appreciate your response Paul. Seems like its to much work anymore to simply expect parts to fit right. Any particular brand you would recommend? And to Conanski, its not my first rodeo with brakes. The leading and trailing shoes were put on there correctly. I have just never experienced a brake shoe defective from factory. However I have had a brake pad from rockauto breaking in half on me during braking nearly causing me to lose my life in the middle of a highway....that was not very fun..

 

I've heard of materials separating as well. Luckily never experience it yet!
And yes, even when some parts fit, they may still fail right out of the box. The Ford starter relay/solenoid has it's own thread going in the '80-'86 forums. Electric parts failures are legion and legend...

Unfortunately it's been going on a long time now. The first time was with pads about 15 years ago. But the second time was not long after with some shoes for a different vehicle.
I did not have any trouble with my first AC Delco pads for the Buick, nor with the StopTech pads that replaced them. But that's a very limited sampling so hard to say how much weight that can carry.

Best of luck with this shoe change.

Paul

 

The issue with drum brake shoes in my experience tends to be the area where they pivot around that big boss sticking out the backing plate on the top side. Namely the grooves/cutouts for it ain't deep enough, or are not positioned right in the vertical direction so when you install the shoes they tend to not sit centered with respect to the backing plate but hang down a bit (easily verified by measuring distance between steel part of shoes and lip of backing plate top and bottom). Sometimes it's both of these together even.

Solution is to take an air-powered die-grinder and open up the grooves/cutouts in the direct your particular set of shows needs. Same result can be accomplished with an angle grinder and a flap wheel as well.

In case of disc brake pads, the problem spots are usually the ears that go into the the caliper bridges - grinder with flap wheel fixes that easy enough.

 

Great point about the drums and the anchor pin (I think it's called?). I admit I never checked that aspect, and just dealt with the friction surfaces.
But on the pads, that was not my experience. The metal backing plates and ears fit perfectly into the calipers and brackets. No issue there that i could see.
Here again I did not look closely to see if removing some material would change anything, but them fitting so naturally seemed like it was not an issue.

I'll look closer at both of those aspects the next time i run into the issue.

Paul