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Porsche Club of America
The Northeast Region

By Tom Tate
NOR'EASTER Online - January 2004

When I was in college it was an all day job with a couple of friends just to adjust the brakes on my '58 VW. The first job was to jack up the car. No easy feat with the factory supplied jack. I really believe that it was an armament left over from the German war machine built to kill and maim the enemy. The mystery of its operation was passed down from one college roommate to another. What I remember most was that to lower the car you had to duck down real low, hit the metal bar that was used to release the pressure on the jack shaft and run from the car. It was sorta like throwing the firecracker after your best friend was supposed to light it. You didn't want to wait to long but then you didn't want to leave early either. Those jacks never got any easier to use, we just quit using them.

Once in the air, the book was consulted (usually a Clymers manual) and a decision was made about which of the old bent screwdrivers that your father gave you looked most like the brake adjustment tool in the picture. It was always easy to find the adjusters, one on the rear and two on the front, but it was tough to remember which way it went to tighten the brake. The old rhyme of 'righty tighty, lefty loosey' didn't seem to apply and it was trial and error (mostly error) that worked. The adjuster would only move one tooth at a time which seemed to be about 3 degrees for each turn so it took a while to get the job done even if you were going the right way. With a couple of friends standing around giving out free advice you can understand how the job could take much longer that expected. The process seemed rather vague, sorta like the drum brakes themselves. It was easy to understand how the local repair garages could charge so much because it was so complicated. Strange how they would never let you stand around and watch, probably some kind of union rule. 

It wasn't until a few years later that I had to remove an actual drum that I discovered how simple and straightforward the system really was. You push the fluid into the wheel cylinder, it expands, pushes the brake shoe into the drum. The drum rubs the brake shoe and the car slows down. With that information I could practically adjust the brakes in the dark and with the right jack, do the job in less that an hour.

That mechanical knowledge, while instilling great confidence, still didn't get me over the brake fluid mystery. I knew brake fluid to be the nastiest liquid on the planet. A fluid that would make the strongest baked enamel bubble in moments, long before you could reach that rag under the car. It was so slippery that if you got on your hands you might as well get out from under the car and go take a shower because you wouldn't be able to pick up anything on the first try anyway. On top of that it was rumored that it could attract water and while I could never see any water in the can I was a believer. The stuff was just nasty. The term ' bleeding the brakes' always seemed like some sorta jungle ritual that only the tribal chief was allowed to perform. I can remember going to great lengths not to disturb or otherwise loosen the brake lines so the ritual would not have to be performed. Once, I was going to pull the transmission out of a 356 to give it a good cleaning while the engine was out but decided against it when I discovered that I would have to disconnect the brake lines. That would have allowed air in the brake lines and required that the brakes be bleed, nope, not me!  I really don't remember who showed me the secret handshake that allowed me to join the brotherhood of brake bleeders but it was like learning how to dive into the deep end of the swimming pool. I was so easy, how could have I thought that there was any mystery to it at all.

Before I broke down and got a pressure bleeder I must have pumped a couple of hundred gallons of brake fluid into that old glass peanut jar. Long after my wife (yes, the first one) refused to wear out her right foot pumping the brake pedal, I could balance the jar on a milk crate. Pump the pedal; listen to the sound of the bubbles stop. Hold the pedal down with a board jammed against the front of the seat, and jump back and tighten the bleeder valve before any air got into the system. Somehow it didn't seem all that complicated. But then there were discussions about how pushing the brake pedal to the floor made the piston in the master cylinder move past its normal wear point and that could cause it to fail prematurely. It seemed logical so I bought an overpriced pressure bleeder from that red catalog with the garage floor that's much too clean (doesn't he ever spill anything, or even go in there?). Yes, it works great, but it introduced even more mystery into the process. How does adding pressure to the replaced peanut jar make the brake fluid come out? I really don't want to know, just as long as it works.  I was just hoping to have one less mystery in my life at this age. Somehow answering these questions has become less important as I have gotten older. Like the guy said, I don't need to know how a watch works to know what time it is. 

That doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to know how the synchronizers work in a gearbox or how a limited slip knows how to limit the slip. But at this point with most of my brain cells filled with stuff I'll never need to recall I'm not sure that there is actually room left for the information. Besides I need to leave room for more important data like kids addresses and grandchildren's birthdays. KTF!