Hi Paul,  I should have mentioned that when dealing with a 50 year old car, the choices of relined shoes available are probably limited.  So you may be ahead to take your shoes to a brake relining specialty shop and tell them you want a good quality, soft lining.  There's one I'm familiar with in Minneapolis called Brake and Equipment Whse.  If you need their phone number, let me know.  Several years ago I had a '74 pontiac firebird and it had a leaky rear wheel cylinder.  It was wintertime, and my wife needed it to drive to work.  So I took it to a friend of mine (independent repair shop) and told him I wanted the best brake shoes installed on the rear along with the wheel cylinder.  After that, the car never stopped nearly as good as before.  The pedal pressure required to stop was much higher.  I sold the car several years ago, and I told the buyer the story and recommended that he go to some softer, middle-of-the-road rear brake shoes.  This was with no change to the front pads.  Good luck!

Nick

Paul:

I just remembered something.  On my '57, I removed the power booster (I was building it as a drag car), and found I had excessive pedal pressure to get the car to stop.  Couldn't lock them up at all.  That's when I found that the power brake cars used a 1 1/8" bore master cylinder and the manual brakes used 1".  You couldn't tell the difference from the outside.  I put the 1" master on and it stops fine, even from 118 mph on the strip.  Maybe you have a 1 1/8" master cylinder.

John

John

John - "The Hoosier Hurricane"

Nick: It never occurred to me about the hard "lifetime" linings. I'll look into it. Thanks.  

Paul

Hi Paul,

Actually you may have premium shoes on your '57.  My experience has been that the "lifetime" shoes and pads are lined with a very hard composition that is hard to wear out, but does not have a good friction coefficient to stop the car.  So what I would recommend is to stick with a brand name of shoes, like Wagner or Raybestos, etc. but go with their middle grade.  Don't get the cheapest and definitely don't get their lifetime stuff.  I've used semi-metallic pads on a couple of cars, they wear the drums or rotors a little more, but not anything serious.  No noise problem.  They work great on a panic stop, and usually get better when warmed up.  May take a little more pedal pressure.

Good luck,  Nick

My 57s brakes in terms of panic stop capability are terrrible. After viewing various blurbs about the subject, I'm thinking that the linings on my car are probably real cheapys. (by the previous owner) Can anyone recommend a better quality lining thats readily available? What about linings containing metallic particles ?  Would they tend to be noisy & eat the Drums?  I don't want to get into a Disc brake conversion at this time.. Any help appreciated.

   

Paul