The Triumph Dolomite Club - Discussion Forum

They are a crap design for sure. Has anyone changed them to manually adjust? How?

The easy way is to drill a hole in the backplate so you can stick a screwdriver through and adjust them manually without removing wheels or drums.

Alternatively, it'd probably be possible to drill out the rivets retaining the top shoe stop bracket on the backplate and sub in a generic Girling manual adjuster, though this might involve taking an angle grinder to the shoes to make an extra bit of space. Not so much of a problem for nowadays, as shoes probably last for donkeys years with the low mileages covered, the average lifespan of a set of shoes is usually in excess of 100,000 miles. More are changed prematurely due to fluid contamination than ever wear out!

Another thought would be to sub in the manual adjust backplate and shoes etc from a 1300 or Toledo. I haven't even offered this up to try, the backplate would need redrilling for sure but don't know if other measurement discrepancies would make it impractical.

Steve

Have you got the adjuster wheels on the right side, they are handed and if you get them wrong the brakes will actually deadjust themselves instead of taking up the slack.

They are that much of a PITA I've been wondering about whether a GT6/Vitesse backplate can be fitted in place, I've been looking at shoe widths/diameters to see what's close to the originals on the 1850 but with a manual adjuster.
Looking at the original backplate I think the pressing would make fitting a manual adjuster directly impractical.

I was thinking mainly about how the Toledo style backplate would match a Sprint axle case, which is a different kettle of fish altogether to Binny's 1850 unit.

The Toledo and 1850 axle cases are identical, so the Toledo manual adjust backplates along with cylinders, shoes, drums etc should swap over as a bolt on. Twill be a PITA cos you have to pull the half shafts to do it and it will pay to investigate different bores of wheel cylinder to get something matching the 1850s, fortunately the manual adjust cylinder is present on all the small chassis cars up to about 73 or so (I think ONLY the GT6 III got the self adjusters and maybe the last 1500 Spits, have to check that) so there's plenty of choice, maybe a Vitesse II cylinder would be good.

GT6 I and II had a larger diameter rear drum than any of the other small chassis cars whilst still retaining manual adjustment. Whether this is the SAME drum and backplate/shoes as the Toledo or whether the Toledo is smaller I couldn't say, my GT6 and Toledo ownership failed to overlap by more than 20 years!

Steve

You may well end up with a smaller diameter drum and littler shoes, but it's not that much change in overall braking effort, with the rear brakes not doing much anyway. Get some TJs and you'll be well away!