To keep myself from getting bored I tend to work on whatever looks interesting at any given time. I didn’t have a lot of time yesterday (5/10/08) because I had to install an old Blaupunkt ‘Frankfurt’ in my wife’s 1972 Fiat 124 Sedan Special and I’m not the best at this sort of thing to begin with. It turned out the dial on the tuner was broken so I had to open up the deck and find stations using a tiny screwdriver to move the guts around then set the mechanical presets with it energized, scary. Now she has 5 choices to listen to and a DIN plug to run an Ipod into. Point of all this: I expected to have at least 2 hours to work on the SS, I ended up with 45 minutes.
When rummaging around looking for stuff to help with the stereo installation I came across the rear brake adjusters in a big zip-lock bag. I poured them out on the bench and squirted them with some WD40 I had on hand. These Girling units are the same as those found on the first few years of Austin Healey 100/3000 roadsters and probably a lot of other stuff that I don’t know about. I wipe down my work bench, get the couple of tools I will need to take them apart and clean them together and get to work. Â I need two for my SS but the bag has 4 in it and I might as well do all four at once, preserving the last two for the next project.
The center shaft with the square drive is the adjuster, turn it clockwise to adjust the brake shoes out, anti-clockwise to adjust them in. The damaged threads can be seen about 6 turns down on the nearer stud.
Some rust and crust can be seen here, but I don’t think it’s too bad. I pulled the seal and that weird washer that allows flow through the array of holes under the seal out and set to work with various implements to clean it up.