Adjusting drum brakes
 

Where I live we don't parallele park so drum brakes don't self adjust. In the "old days" we used the "spoon" thru a slot on bottom of backing plate. How does one do an HHR?

Top of the plate

The search tool at the top of the page works - looking for "drum brake adjustment" gave this link as the first in the search results: https://www.chevyhhr.net/forums/brakes-%7C-suspension-%7C-shocks-%7C-struts-24/proper-rear-drum-brake-adjustment-procedure-36754/

same as most Chevy's from the last 50 years. a slot on the backing plate

Part of the deal is you probably have to take the brakes apart and clean things up or maybe replace the self adjuster before you try to set the brakes.

Mine were solid with rust. I managed to get them apart and knock them apart then cleaned up the parts and put some silver anti seize stuff on the parts before reassembling the whole thing.

Cleaning things up worked for me but I still replaced the parts the next summer anyway. The new parts were also coated with the silver anti seize just to make sure they would not get jammed up.
Sometimes a little preventative maintenance is better than fixing jammed up stuff later.

Did I miss something?

What does parallel parking have to do with drum brakes adjusting?

The self-adjusters don't work very well no matter how ya park.. Best to know how to keep them adjusted properly, I check mine every tire rotation..

In most other drum brake equipped cars, going in reverse and then applying the brakes will adjust the drum brakes. Our cars do not for some reason.



+1

I rotate the tires with every oil change which is every 3k miles by my cars computers request lol. So I check/adjust mine every 3k miles.

[QUOTE=07azhhr;746777]In most other drum brake equipped cars, going in reverse and then applying the brakes will adjust the drum brakes. Our cars do not for some reason.

:smile: Yeah, I'm very aware of the drum brake operations. Did a bunch of brake jobs back in my mechanic days.
Just didn't get the parallel parking quote. Sounded like the OP never backs up and uses the brakes any other time.

It takes a lot more than backing into a parking spot to self adjust. Slamming the brakes while backing down a hill at 15 MPH usually will do it.