never had this happen before..

The other day I was on my way to work in my '90 W-150. Coming to a stop sign I hit the brakes and heard a banging noise followed by losing all pedal pressure. Luckily there was no traffic and I wasn't going very fast anyways so I was able to come to stop by gearing down and pumping the pedal a bunch.

At first I thought the noise was up front, but I looked under the back and noticed one of the E-brake cables hanging down along with a piece of brake line. I looked at the backing plate on the driver side and then I see the wheel cylinder is on the bottom!

Anyways, I get it back home (using the E-brake still working on one wheel which worked surprisingly well) I get the drum off and see the backing plate looks like this...the inner part where it bolts to the housing was pretty rusty but I never thought it would rip off. I actually saw a few small holes in it back when I bought the truck, and I knew I should have replaced it then but I kept putting it off because of the pain of having to pull the axle (9.25), the stinky gear oil etc...Guess I should have done it sooner, and it could have been a lot worse.

i've seen where the drum itself breaks...the face that bolts to the axle breaks from the drum surface that touches the brake shoe lining...

Yea, you have rust issues up there, don't ya! Good thing you weren't in a critical situation. That might have ended up in a tragedy. Events like these give us the time to do things we need to do, don't they?

Mark

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Yea, you have rust issues up there, don't ya! Good thing you weren't in a critical situation. That might have ended up in a tragedy. Events like these give us the time to do things we need to do, don't they?

Mark

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Yeah, like I said it could have been much worse. I had brake lines bust on me on other cars before, though always on the rear for some reason? But I would usually still have some brake power...this time I had nothing, coasted right on through the stop sign.