I think I fixed the bus! And the best thing – it was free!
I spent some time this week researching the swooshing/ clicking/ clattering noise I was hearing from the passenger rear wheel. I had determined that it wasn’t tire related – the drum was hard to turn by hand though, and once I backed off the brake adjusters, the drum seemed loose. It also had a lot of brown brake dust everywhere. The possible diagnosis’ were everything from a loose axle nut, to a problem with the brake internals, to a bad wheel bearing or CV joint. The common denominator in all of these is that I needed a torque wrench and 36mm socket to remove/ tighten the axle nut. Unfortunately, those torque bad boys are like $100 or more – having just spent some coin on getting the bus to this point, I was very hesitant to go buy a big tool that I might use once.
Thankfully, this is where my local Autozone comes in – turns out you can rent tools like this torque wrench and the axle socket that I needed. You pay the value of the tool… but if you bring it back in working condition within 90 days you get your money back – like all of your money even the sales tax back – free is always a sweet deal! I looked at their brochure and you can rent all kinds of stuff like steering wheel and brake drum pullers, wrenches, compression kits, etc. I’ll be sure to utilize this service going forward.
Back to the bus, it was pretty simple – I pulled out the little pin in the axle castle nut, spritzed the nut with pb blaster, fit the torque wrench on, twisted it up to the required 250lbs and slowly added pressure to the nut. It was definitely not torqued to 250, and it moved easily to the right until the wrench hit the 250 mark and clicked over. Put the pin back in and started the bus up for a nice trip around the parking lot. No noise, no problems, brakes work – Success!
In the end, I don’t think the shop took this drum off, so I definitely can’t and don’t blame Darby – he did a good job with the shifter and the mirrors – bus is running well, and I’m excited to start driving this thing around!
