Rear drum brakes - why?

Around here they put a lot of sand and salt on the roads in the winter. This mess seems to flick up and eat rear rotors.Your very lucky to get 3 yrs. out of a set. Rear drums last forever. I'm sticking with them! Front rotors last much longer.

 

After having to change the back pads on my Silverado every six weeks (!), I find the 30 thousand trouble free miles my drums have given me in the last seven months to be quite refreshing.

Discs on the back? No thanks,,,

 

Did you have a rear disc conversion? I guess the needs of the XR guys and the offroaders is a bit different. I heard that they aren't great cause they throw off the brake balance but they did provide better stopping power.... then again the XR it is on is auto crossed / drifting where the drums get cooked.

 

I agree with you completly...drum brakes are not hard to work on at all, just gotta know what you're doing. Hey, when I first started doing brake jobs, drums were the norm, even for front brakes. (oh shit, I'm dating myself!!)

As far as those complaining about poor braking performance, hell it's a TRUCK!

 

My mom's mustang is 4 wheel drums. It pulls to one side under braking if you don't keep them perfectly adjusted, not to mention you have to mash the brakes to make it stop

I guess that's to be expected from a 44 year old car.

 

i have rear disk on my dd and if driving unloaded they often start smoking lol

 

never had any problems with my breaks, my 99 TRD had 222,000 miles still had the rear shoes. I don't drive up peoples asses or drive like a 16 year old. The only thing I don't like is ABS.

 

Toyota still installing rear drums on the Tacoma is mind boggling to me to be quite honest. As time goes on, you see more an more manufacturers equipping their vehicle with rear discs. For all you that say that rear drums are fine or in some cases better, I call BS! GM has been installing rear discs on their Corvettes since the 70's. Other manufacturers that have been equipping their vehicles w/ rear disc brakes since the days of bell bottom pants and canary yellow wallpaper include MBZ, BMW, Porsche and Jaguar. In 1978 my dad bought my mom a Licoln Versailles (basically a Ford Granada w/ leather) and that car had rear discs. In high school I had a '91 VW Jetta and it had rear discs on it. My '03 Dodge Dakota that I recently traded in had rear discs on it and while towing my boat it had great stopping power. Wish I could say the same for my Tacoma. There is a huge difference in stopping power when towing my boat. So much so, that now I need to spend a couple grand to have a shop pull my boat off the trailer and add trailer brakes. I recently went to the Intl. Auto Show in Los Angeles and almost all the vehicle on display had rear disc brakes. This is even including base models and cheap manufacturers like Kia. Rear drum brakes are an ancient design and far inferior to disc brakes. Toyota has decided to go cheap with the Tacomas...Plain and simple. Just look at the truck and you can see. Look at all the stuff our trucks lack. No cargo lamp, non-illuminated 4x4 switches, only one window switch that lights up at night, no light on the fog lamp switch and so on and so on. Tundra Racing makes a real nice rear disc upgrade for the '05-'11 Tacoma that is real nice and uses actual OEM 4Runner parts if any of you are interested.

 

Rear discs are appropriate in some applications. You can't say that a Corvette or a Porsche having rear discs is an adequate reason for a Tacoma to have rear discs.

Some manufacturers are putting rear discs on some of their vehicles because they are responding to a fairly irrational demand from consumers to have rear discs. People perceive rear disc brakes as "upmarket", largely because they have traditionally only been used when they were needed for the application (such as high performance cars that are designed for the kind of track use that actually does heat soak the rear brakes enough to need additional heat handling capacity).

There's enough variation in Tacoma brakes that I think some people blame the rear drums when the problem lies elsewhere. When I was test driving Tacomas about half of them had what felt like weak brakes. From what others here have reported, there is some variable in the brake system that makes some Tacomas brakes better than others. The one I bought has great brakes, just like about half of the ones I test drove. I suspect either front pad composition or perhaps the ones I thought were weak were TRDs with hydraulic boost (where mine is an SR5 with vacuum boost). I've never been sure what causes the variation.

 

well maintained drum brakes will stop just as well as a disc, and works more than well for our needs in the tacoma.
Having torn several tacoma brakes apart, they are no harder than other companies drum brakes, just a few different links. If you need to work on it, just do one side at a time, so you have a reference.
It's not like the tacoma is a sports car, or is hauling 5th wheels. Enjoy the truck you have, and if it's a deal breaker for you, there are tons of other trucks out there.

 

I have a strong belief that is due to three things.

First, look at the cars that adopted the rear discs first: sports/sporty cars. Vehicles that usually get a time trial at some raceway when reading magazines about it, the same articles that often lead to sports car sales. Drum brakes lose effectiveness when they heat because the drum itself expands away from the shoes; on a sports car running around Nürburgring if the rear brakes start to fade but the fronts do not, you get poor times, spinouts, and accidents. This is also the big reason trucks have adopted them; when you have a heavy trailer (or just a heavy truck), keeping the braking ability even axle to axle can become important, especially in inclement weather.

Second, look at maintenance costs. When you take what ends up being about a $300 repair bill that happens once every 150-300k miles and shorten that down to every 50k or less, and apply that to a fleet, there is big profit there.

Third, a spiffy car sells, and when you put discs behind alloy wheels they look great, so the added cost (since most have drum brakes inside the rear rotors for the emergency brake) tends to pay for itself in vehicle sales.

So really it's just another cost vs performance argument. I won't argue discs' capabilities; on lighter vehicles though that are properly proportioned front to rear, since the front discs are doing anywhere from 70 to 85% of the work, there is often no benefit to the extra cost.

Take the newest Honda Fit for example; it's tall and balanced with more than 65% of its 24xx# mass is over the front axle. So much weight transfers to the front wheels during hard braking that more than one person on fitfreak claimed that in the right conditions with sticky enough tires they nearly lost control when the rear tires came off the ground for an instant. Equipping that car with rear discs would be pointless unless it's autocrossed regularly.

sudo apt-will end mywalloftext

 

Most manufactures of cheap light cars put rear disks on now because they are are less likely to lock up and have got to the point of being cheaper. Rear disks in many applications have far higher maintenance costs then drum brakes. Problematic parking brakes, rotor surfaces and hanging calipers just to name a few. Or cop cars usually would have rear brake problems long before the fronts did same with the transport Chevy vans and Suburbans. Disks have been around for a long time but drums have been around a lot longer and are still used on really big trucks. Front disks are a big improvement over drums they stop straight and resist heat but in the back I'll stick to drums on my truck they last 4 times longer and work fine in normal service.

 

/\ this x2

Drum breaks in the rear provide more stopping power during towing/hauling. Its a simple matter of friction. Compare disc pads to drum pads...drum pads are twice the size.

Big rigs are still using drums. Why? Because discs are more prone to warping under heavy loads with heavy braking. Drums, believe it or not dissipate heat just as well as discs. Hard to warp a drum and again the size of the pads are a major factor in this discussion.

 

Drums are efficient, cost less along with easy maintenance. If you cant repair your own drum brakes then you really don't need to be working on brakes period.

 

Disc IS better for some applications, it DOES brake better for some applications, if you have it in mind to do it I say do it, as long as you are aware of the above-stated caveats.

No, it will not necessarily improve braking performance x-fold. However on my 1st gen Tacoma I'm about to swap to disc in the rear, and I justify it as so:

• Disc brakes clean better. Drum brakes through muck and water just collect muck and water. Disc cleans itself and is ready to perform again.

• The way they design the drums, if you do off-road your vehicle often (as I do), then you're harder on your axle seals, which will just leak right into the drum, effectively killing your shoes & drum pads. Disc brakes do away with this, as the leak does not direct the fluid directly to your pads/disc.

• Drum brakes NEVER in my experience actually adjust properly. they're supposed to adjust when driven in reverse and brake is applied, and by repeated pulls of the parking lever. I find my brakes SUCK except for the few days after I have the truck in for brakes or inspection.

• Loaded standard setup when I go out and about I'm at almost a 50/50 split weight distribution, this is before I find some unattended downed trees and load up with wood so disc in rear = better overall brake performance (for me and others in the same boat)

The argument that drum must be more the better because it's still almost new after 200,000 miles makes no sense: that means your drum brakes aren't contacting, and you have NO stopping force in the rear. I'd rather replace cheap, easy disc pads more often but have more reliable stopping!

 

Why everyone hate on drums?

 

I have drums in the rear??LOL jk. they get the job done.

 

I have no issues with rear drum brakes on the rear, my Tacoma stops impressively well. Regardless of the vehicle, rear brakes make up about 30% or less of the total braking power. In the end, who cares?

 

Drums still have more braking power.

 

I would say that the stock brakes work pretty well! The Tacoma stops quicker loaded than every other truck did empty in the pickuptrucks.com mid-size shoot out. Can't really complain about those results!!