Re: Wile Family's Second Packard
Posted by Tim Wile On 2012/3/25 18:31:51
A cold and damp morning turned into a nice, sunny Sunday afternoon and what a better way to spend such an afternoon than working on a Packard. I spent some time working on the rear brakes on the 400 today and found one more unpleasant surprise.
I had originally thought that the noise and dragging on the passenger's rear wheel was caused by a hanging up parking brake. Wrong! When I pulled the brake drum, a shower of brake lining parts fell out of the wheel, along with the brake adjustment piston. It looked as if someone had taken a hammer to the front rear brake shoe and banged it all to h**l. The only thing left on the front rear brake shoe were the rivets. I'm surprised that the inside of the drum wasn't scored, but thankfully, it wasn't. I did check out the manual emergency brake and it was in its proper position. Wow!.
Fortunately, I had some spare brake parts from my rebuilding of the Patrician's brake system and replaced the destroyed brake shoe and the adjustment piston. After getting everything back together, I took the 400 out for a short spin to see if that solved the problem. Well, yes and no. The rear brake no longer hangs up and puts drag on the car. But now there is a loud scraping noise coming from the rear wheel. I think it is the rear passenger's wheel, but I cannot e sure. I'm going to have to have someone else stand by the car while it is driven forward in order to ascertain just which wheel is causing the noise. I strongly suspect the rear passenger's wheel, since that was the one I worked on and I didn't have that sound prior to pulling the drum.
Could it be that I tightened the rear drum retaining nut too much?
I'll have to post some photos of the banged up brake shoe when I get new batteries in my camera.
In the meantime, I'm ready to re-assembly the heater core assembly for the 400. I had dis-assembled it in order to get rid of the rust and give everything a nice new coat of paint. I also took apart the air duct door and replaced the deteriorated rubber seal with a newly fabricated one. Since the old seal was still present, albeit in poor condition, I used it as a pattern by laying it on the new piece of rubber and spraying a light coat of primer over the rubber. All I had to do then was to cut out the pattern and, viola! A new gasket/seal!
Tonight I'll be stapling the two sides of the air duct door together with the seal in the middle. Then I'll be ready to re-assemble the whole thing and install it on the 400. Hopefully, sometime this week I'll get to both the wheel issue and finish putting the heater core assembly back together. I just love the spring!
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