Ok, so my daily beater is a 1998 Civic EX with drum brakes in the rear.

Currently I have 112K on it and I purchased the car with around 70K.

How can you tell if the drum brakes need to be worked on. I do know that if I pull up on the emergency brake the car slows as opposed to locking up the rear tires. Are drum brakes easy enough to work on yourself, any special tools and whatnot? All of my other vehicles have had disk brakes, so I have not run into this before.

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

 

Drum brakes are a bitch, take them somewhere unless you already know what you're doing.

 

Yes they are easy to work on...

1. remove the drum... Sometimes it will be hard to do... Hit it witha hammer and work it off....

2. Once that is done... Spray half a can of brake cleaner on the complete assembly...

3. Loook at the thickness of your shoes... If under 1/8 thick... Install new ones..

4. These brakes need to be adjusted every now and then... You will see on top of the hub a screw type adjustment. turn it a couple of times and use your drum as a guaging tool to make sure that the shoes are lightly grazing it, but not to the point where you can't turn your wheel.... Repeat as necessary...

That's it...

Now if you need to change your brakes, get a honda manual like Chilton or Haynes to help. Much easier...

fs

 

Yeah, I have a crappy manual that is for both civic and integras, so it has not been much help on the drum brake thing. The instructions are only for disk stuff.