Brake drums

[Synchro909]

My machinist made an arbour for the rear drums. It didn't take him long and he now gets plenty of work for it. He did my drums on his lathe and they are excellent.

[CarlG]

Bite the bullet & send everything to Randy Gross.

[SAJ]

Many years ago I cut off a short piece of a damaged axle, centred-drilled both ends in one of my lathes, bored and turned a centering mandrel to a sliding fit on the axle stub and into the hub bearing bore and bolted the axle taper into the hub with the centering mandrel in place in the bearing bore. Then mounted the axle stub between centres and drove it with a piece of keysteel clamped to the axle nut and riding against a chuck jaw. All as shown in the pictures. A dti inside the exposed outer part of the bearing bore proved the accuracy. The nut could also be chucked directly in the 3 jaw to drive the drum, and the cutting force would act to tighten the nut,rather than undoing it.
In every cast iron drum I have swaged onto a hub, with 4 nut holes bolted up tight while I swaged the 5th one, I have afterwards had to remove 10 thou or so to true them (per side that is, or 20 thou in diameter).
I used to turn true the hub flange faces until I found that the hub flanges are so easily bent that it is not worthwhile thinning them - the drum still needs correcting for warp after swaging.
One car recently came back for me to true the drums again by about 6 thou after they had warped again after a quite a few thousand miles and the brake pedal started pulsing. Cast iron drums in every case.
Front drums are easier to set up in a machine lathe.
Re Brents comment, just bolting a good axle stub up to the taper without using a centralising spacer in the bearing bore results in a surprising amount of wobble in the drum. Maybe lapping each drum to the axle stub may improve that, but it is not feasible or advisable when many different drums are involved.
SAJ in NZ