Technical Break shoe components not lining up - any ideas?

I really appreciate the help and information. Thank you sir.

 

Very good advice, thank you. I typically don’t throw things away but I have a fear of becoming a hoarder when it comes to old car parts lol. My apologies for spouting off when I thought one of the responses was needlessly unpleasant.

 

Unfortunately I deleted most of the pics of the original set up but I saved two. Note that the car was facing in the other direction when these were taken. I use these same springs and just cleaned them up. One thing I have noticed in the shop manual is that the bottom spring should be installed BELOW the adjuster. That alone could make a significant difference with my crooked wheel cylinder links. I learned my lesson about assuming what I found was correct.

 

One thing I did notice when putting it all back together with the new shoes was that the bottom spring didn’t really seem to be putting much tension on the lower area. When I get my new springs I will re-orient the shoes as instructed and reassemble everything per the manual this time.

 

I call working on our Cars a continuing education course. We are never done learning what we should have done first, and we seldom forget those lessons. You'll get through this and looking back it will be just another day in school.

 

Experience is what you get when you don't have experience.

 

Absolutely, and those are my best days. There is nothing like the feeling of success when some component of the car is finally doing what you'd hoped after much research, and trial and error. When I got the Caddy it didn't run, stop, or steer. All of these things are in much better order now and chasing perfection isn't about being perfect, but the satisfaction of having figured it out.

 

Very very true. Thank you for the help.

 

I've found out through this posting that I very likely now have the correct shoes, and what I found when I bought the car was someone's improvisation using other parts they had on hand. I give credit to whoever did that for sure, but it became problematic when I tried to replace select new parts and following the original set up.

 

No, not too embarrassed. I had some work issues that kept me away from fun stuff. Thank you for the concern, and all of this advice has definitely helped me make sense of the improv job that was going on in my rear drums when I bought the car. All is going back to factory spec as soon as the new parts from Caddy Daddy arrive through the snow.

 

This is good, and a good practice, but it assumes that the previous guy that worked on it did it correctly. You may have just repeated a previous mistake.

Is the axle original to the car?

 

As painful as our mistakes are, we do learn valuable lessons that help more in the future. It appears that someone before you didn't learn how to do brakes and left you with a bad example to follow from. Bet that once you get a proper spring kit and assemble them with good info you'll have great brakes. And that's always satisfying when you fix somebody's mistake for your car.

 

I'm thinking that you will be good when you get the correct springs and put the shoes on in the correct orientation.
One thing I want you to do though is when you have the shoes off take a serious look at the pads that the shoes ride on on the backing plates that Rich B pointed out in his photo. If and most likely they do have grooves worn in them you need to take a flap wheel or grinding disk to them and slick them off smooth and even with each other. if they are real bad you may have to weld them over and then slick them off smooth. The old shoes wear right along with the pads and tend to slide over the grooves but new shoes with sharp edges on the contact spots can hang up on those grooves causing wonky brake action.
Before you put the shoes back on take a little bit of grease on your finger tip (just a smear) and put a smear of grease on each pad. I was taught to use white lube but good quality wheel bearing grease will work. That will help the shoes slide on the pads and not hang up.

 

The star wheel should have course teeth on manual adjust brakes, and fine teeth on automatic adjusters.