Front Brake Shoes full width hub

[philwhitelaw]

Hello everyone,
 I am a little bit confused and need some advice about the brake shoes on my '61 GF. All the literature say the shoes for a cast iron full width hub should be 1 3/8 wide, the ones I have had fitted since I bought it are only 1 1/8 wide and are for a Triumph. Measuring the useable braking area in the hub I have 1 3/16. On the backplate there is a gap of about 1/8 between the shoe and the plate. Do the shoes overhang the hub by any chance or have I got a mix and match setup here ?
Thanks in advance.

[Slymo]

I had issues finding the right shoes for my 58 Super Rocket. I bought some online from Feked or similar but they were too wide by about 1/4" and the pivot point was for a larger diameter pin I'd say 9/16" rather than the 1/2" i had (although it could be bigger than that I'm working from memory could be 9/16"to 5/8"). I ended up cutting the width of the shoes down with a 1mm cutting disk so that the shoes fitting into the cam and looked to sit flat against the brake plate. I then machined a piece of steel pipe to the right OD and ID put a cut through it so I could slip it over the pivot pin and then squeezed it shut and brazed the cut so it was bushing the pivot out to the right size for the shoes. There was initially some noise of interference in the hub so I took the angle ginder and ground another 1-2mm off the outside edge of the shoes where they were just nicking the inside of the hub then after a couple of weeks of riding around I took the brake plate off again and used a belt sander to take the high spots off the linings. Brakes are pretty good now.

[Swarfcut]

 From memory (it was a long time ago) the shoe pivot and cam pads centres were offset in relation to the lining centre. By about 1/8".

   So look carefully and try the shoes the other way  round. It may be the answer. Otherwise if my memory serves, your new shoes are not the absolute correct shoes.

 I was lucky all those years ago.  Ferodo still offered a re-lining service so that's what I did, got the old shoes back with factory fitted linings.

 Swarfy.

[Billybream]

Hi, just checked my oringinal 8" full width hub brake plate (which has been replaced by TLS set up in 1970)  the shoe width is 1 1/8".
I cannot be sure if the shoes are as they came out of the factory as over time they may well have been exchanged, but in the old days we used to reline ourselves, so suspect 1 1/8" is correct

[groily]

To use up some of the time that has suddenly become available  , I've just been through the exact same process as Slymo. I couldn't find the narrower 8" linings either, so used the wider ones (SOK, Taiwanese?) and milled them to suit, made some collets for the pivot end (9/16, not 1/2", yes), and faffed about to get a decent fit. Plus made a new external lever for the thing to get a better angle than the revised arrangement offered. Slow job making a good square hole in steel, and working out where to orient it, but a pretty good result in terms of 'it works'. Meantime, the old shoes are off being relined, so there'll be that option as well. Plus got some 7" shoes which I hope will fit the rear when I get there, without all the hassle.

[JulianS]

As Swarfy says the correct shoes have linings offset and the leading and trailing shoes are different, whethre fixed pivot or floating pivot.
The linings are 1 1/8 inches wide.

The photos show an 8 inch front fitted with floating shoes.

The Triumph 8 inch iron hub (straight spoke type not the wider 1966 type) shoes interchange with the BSA shoes.

[groily]

That's great to see & know Julian. Thanks for posting the pics.
Gawd knows what the both-the-same, non floating inch 'n 1/8th ones in mine were really for or from - but they're defo not like your correct ones as you can see. They'd done about 13 years, until one bonded lining started to disintegrate.
So I'm probably wasting my €€ having the wrong things relined then  . . . oh well! At least the modded mix of bits is working pretty well.

And Glory Be! the post lady has just come for the first time for 12 days and I have got a load of oily bits from the UK. Wow -  feels like Christmas - and plenty to do for a couple of days.

[morris]

The 1 1/8 brake shoes are extremely difficult to find.
I did the usual suppliers all to no avail.
In the end I relined them myself with a set of NOS Ferodo liners kindly delivered by another forum member.
I did found out afterwards that Gary Parkin can supply them, so in high need;
http://www.gp-motos.com/brake-shoes/

[Slymo]

I was initially planning to recline the originals with some asbestos linings that my brother had for a Bradford van. On examining them I found that they would need alteration to fit and also that the two existing shoes in my front brake weren’t a matched pair anyway. What with that and a reluctance to give myself asbestosis I went for altering the new ones.