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| Joined: | 07-06-2005 |
| Location: | Eugene, Oregon USA |
| Posts: | 162 |
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http://jhppg.com/gallery/album139
After taking everything apart and putting it back together, I have a hypothesis on the purpose of the single paper gasket in the system.
The o-ring on my bearing failed, and oil leaked out. For quite a while, the paper gasket did its job, and the oil all leaked out through the single little hole in the brake backing plate, and stayed out of the drum braking mechanism. But, sometime before I bought the car, the little hole fouled with old oil and grime, and the oil began to be forced out into the brake assembly. When I finally took everything apart, the oil was flowing both out over the lip of the bearing retainer plate, in the center, and out the bottom of the retainer plate, where the gasket had also failed. So, the gasket is there to keep the oil out of the brakes (where it could cause much greater damage, ruining the shoes like it had done for me).
When I put everthing back together, I used RTV red, the kind for high temperatures. It seemed to have the right characteristics from the information on the package. I also very carefully cleaned out the drain hole on the backing plate, and ran the RTV around it so that it would not be blocked. That way, if the RTV I ran around the outside of the bearing fails, the oil will still not make its way into the brakes. Hopefully everything will work right now.
I'm not sure the bearing was bad; I'd been hearing low rumbles from the rear end, but it looked like the o-ring was all that was the problem. I'll have to keep an ear out now to see if I still have the rumblings. If it wasn't the bearing, I probably could have simply pulled the axle and re-coated everything with RTV gasket goop, as Mike suggested in an earlier post on a different thread.
If my rumblings remain, I'll start looking at the u-joints on the driveshaft, since several other folks have reported these as the cause behind similar rumblings.