Over the last few months the handbrake has gradually become less effective and the cable has required some adjustment.  I decided to take a look inside the rear brake drums to see if there was an issue.  Normally removing a brake drum requires the use of a puller however, these brake drums have a great feature – there are 2 threaded holes (M14 course thread) into which bolts can be inserted to push the drum off the axle flange.

Once the drum was removed the problem was obvious – one on the brake shoe return springs had failed.

Unfortunately, the Chilean Iveco dealers don’t hold spares for the Daily 4×4 in-country (this is despite the fact that they sell the vehicles and there is one parked outside in from of their garage!) so we placed an order for the item which should arrive from Italy in about 3 to 4 weeks’ time. 

In the meantime, for an interim-fix we visited several garages and brake specialists trying to find the spring locally, but it is not a very common size.  The only solution I could find was to use two smaller springs hooked together.  It fits nicely and will work until the Iveco part arrives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once I had the temporary springs fitted, I noticed that the automatic compensator that adjusts the brakes as they wear, had not really been doing its job very well.  I therefore manually adjusted the brake shoes up to the correct clearance and reassembled the brake drums.  When pushing the drum back on, I used the wheel nuts to push it home however, the nuts became thread-bound before the drum was fully on.  I found that by hanging a couple of spanners from the wheel studs, I could use the spanner handles as spacers for the wheel nuts – it worked really well.

Finally, I did another handbrake cable adjustment and I can report that there is much less brake pedal movement and the handbrake function is back to normal – fixed!

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