I have a little story about honesty. It's sorta relevant to the drum removal thread.

I moved from Berkeley CA to Logan Utah for graduate school in 1988-1989, bought a nice used '81 Westy in SLC. Had to get a safety inspection. There was no place in Logan that I particularly trusted to do it, so I picked a place at random and hoped for the best. Knowing that the safety inspection required pulling a drum, I asked them if they'd use a puller to remove the wheel (I didn't know much about the Vanagon, obviously!), and the owner said "yep". I asked him to replace rear brake shoes while he had it on the lift, and came by to collect it a few hours later, drove out of the lot, and as I braked for the first corner, felt a powerful rhythmic bumping in the brake pedal, like maybe about the rpm of the drum going around... so I took it back to the shop, and asked a young kid there if he knew how they'd removed the drums. Said his dad whacked on 'em with a sledge until they came off.

Then I talked to the owner (the kid's dad), not mentioning what his son had told me, but indicating that the drums were trashed. Asked him if they'd use a puller on the drums. He said yes, they had, but was willing to fix the problem. He made a big deal out of doing a moral business (!) and how he was going to do right by me. Generously gave me a ride back up to campus. En route he bragged about being a bishop in the Mormon church and asked me how I liked Utah. I said I liked it pretty well, people were honest, etc... you can imagine I was giving him a pretty direct stare as I said that. He did not flinch.

One drum was unsalvageable -- they turned it down way too thin trying to get it round again. The replacement from a yard was almost as bad... I bet I know how they got it off! But it's what I ended up with.

Final note to the story... the parking brake never worked quite right after that and the self-adjusters never seemed to be doing much either. Maybe three years ago I replaced the brake shoes and wiggly drum myself and noticed that the pushrod had been installed backwards on both sides, or something weird like that (my memory has faded, I recall something being upside down and/or backwards). As a result neither the self-adjusters nor the parking brake were doing anything at all!

A year later I moved to Kansas for more grad school... sometimes it amazes me that I ever moved back!

Gary

----------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Shea shea@xmission.com Salt Lake City http://www.xmission.com/~shea