Why drums?

[tompatjr]

My main reason for liking disc in addition to better braking is ease of maintenance, they are just flat out cleaner to work on.

Plus they look a lot sportier than your typical rusty old drum.

 

[Wiley Coyote]

For my TJ I'm currently swapping to rr. discs on my new axle. It wasn't necessarily for more braking power. They are just much better a shedding dirt and mud and easier to clean and maintain and more consistent in varying conditions.

You got a point on that one. The last time I went 4 x 4ing I got mud caked up in my rear drums. It was a pretty nasty trail, definitely not your typical outing. Everything was fine until a couple days later after all of the mud dried. I was having all sorts of weird brake problems. It took me a couple of days to figure out what was going on. After I pulled the drums and cleaned everything out really good they were back in working order. The front disks worked like a champ the whole time.

 

[explorer]

Sounds like a normal run around here. Not that I care for mud that much. If you get in real deep, it can give you an impressively detailed cast of the inside of your drum. He,he.
And as far as the truck brakes locking up w/ drums. Thats because of another advantage of drums. It's because of the servo effect that can be tuned in or out of a drum configuration. Same effect as the e-brake on the dhaft that someone was saying would break if applied while moving. The brake when applied tends to make itself apply even harder. This is changed by the pivot point of the shoes and by different shoe sizes or compostion frt. to rr. on the brake. They require less operating pressure to apply. Also on the European trucks, ever seen the water cooling used on the race trucks?

You got a point on that one. The last time I went 4 x 4ing I got mud caked up in my rear drums. It was a pretty nasty trail, definitely not your typical outing. Everything was fine until a couple days later after all of the mud dried. I was having all sorts of weird brake problems. It took me a couple of days to figure out what was going on. After I pulled the drums and cleaned everything out really good they were back in working order. The front disks worked like a champ the whole time.

 

[Matthew Currie]

Early Range Rovers have a drum parking brake on the rear driveline... cool idea if you ask me.

It's way cool, but (big BUT here) if you have an open diff it means you potentially are braking only a single rear wheel, not at all cool if you remember the other function of the parking brake, which is the "emergency" brake. The old CJ's had the same arrangement, and it was a very powerful way to apply the brakes, because the holding power, like the driving power, is geared down. It also was easy to maintain, and being entirely independent of the rest of the braking system it didn't depend on the condition of the service brakes. But when the brake lines rotted off and you had to get home on the emergency brake it was pretty iffy.

 

[AZ Jeff]

The brake when applied tends to make itself apply even harder. This is changed by the pivot point of the shoes and by different shoe sizes or compostion frt. to rr. on the brake. They require less operating pressure to apply.

We engineers call that type of brake a "self-energizing drum brake".