Rebuild 10 Inch Brakes

In a word DON'T!!! I started off to put new shoes on. Had the drums turned and had the parts in hand. Oooops, the bleeders are broken off!!
Order new wheel cylinders (shoes and cylinders are the ONLY parts available for 10 inch) and discover you have to take the backing plate off to get the wheel cylinders off. In order to do that you have to take the hubs off and to do that you have to take the locking hubs off......get my point?? I should have just ordered 11 Inch kits for which parts are readily available. Now I've got all these parts on their way so I'm going to not waste the money.
Perhaps I should save all the 10 inch stuff for the back and put 11 inch on the front...

 

I would put the 11 inch drums in the rear and do a disc conversion in the front. Thats what I'm doing some time in the very near future. I have the 11 inch brakes and the front calipers and brackets all ready to be installed. All I need are the discs. I have the 10 inch drums all the way around and have changed all the cylinders and also rebuilt my master cylinder. They stop me but they make me nervous when I'm going down the pass or any type of freeway speeds. There is a very good write up in the tech section on the disc swap.

 

I bought a DJ5 parts Jeep, year unkown at first. It ended up being a '74 so it had 10" drums. I was gonna go ahead and use them in place of the 9" drums anyways, till I got to takin' it apart and found that the wheel cylinder pins were all screwed up in one corner (looked like someone lost 'em, then tried to make a new pair and it didn't work out). I ended up buying a pair of 11's from Nickmil that are ready to bolt on, and acquired another pair that need to be gone through prior to installation. Although I don't have them on yet I have a gut feeling I did the right thing.

I've got a bunch of 10" brake stuff available for ubercheap if anyone wants it.

Don

 

Gregg somethings not right, I rebuilt my wheel cylinders on my 10" brakes and did not remove the backing plates to get the cylinders off. The 10" brakes also share some of the same hardware that the 11" brakes do, regardless of what the parts guy told you. The rest of them you can take to a decent flaps and find it on there rack. Unless it has change in the last few years thre was nothing for the 10" brakes you couldn't get. If you want to go to the 11" brakes thats fine, but the 10" brakes work good especially after I put disk brakes on the front. I could lock my 10" brakes up on all 4 wheels without a problem when I still had them. I changed to disk for the simple fact that i wanted them for wet weather and they were attached to my new dana 30 that didn't drip oil from the knuckles.

 

My source for the information was Turner Four Wheel Supply. I think my brakes (except shoes) had never been apart in almost 40 years and they where a mess. As is often the case with this old Jeep as I do one thing others "pop" up. In the process of working on the brakes it became obvious that the spindle bearings needed attention so pulling it all apart made sense to me. Since I intended to upgrade to 11 inch brakes eventually, it just seems to me now would have been the time to do it on the front at least. The bolts that hold the wheel cylinder are inset into metal parts around them and I couldn't get ahold of them on the Jeep. Off the Jeep my impact gun made fast work of them. The little S tube was VERY frozen and required lots of lubricant and big vise grips.
My purpose in my post was meant more in the spirit of humor that I am finding very helpful as I work on my old "inexpensive" hobby.