I just redid the brakes on my car. New drums, shoes and well as new brembo rotors and ACT ceramic pads up front.

The job went pretty smoothly, and after road testing it, the (foot) braking felt really good. It stopped nice and straight and the pedal felt firm.

However, I do have a couple of questions and if you had a GXE with drum brakes, you may have expereinced this as well.

1) Brake shoe adjuster - I adjusted this to the minimum length before putting it back in. I drove the car for a few miles and it stopped fine, but should I readjust this a week or so after the brake shoes break-in?

2) Parking brake. I had a lot of slack after putting the new shows and drums in. I removed the center console and adjusted the cable (I think all the way) to take out the slack. It's about what it was before, but it wasn't that tight to begin with. Also the parking brake doesn't seem to hold as well as when the old brake shoes were in there. Will the parking brakes hold better after the shoes break in?

I used OEM brake shoes from Nissan. I'm happy to say the noise went away from the drums too.

 

what kind of noises were your drums making? mine make an odd noise every now and then.

 

Just before I stop (like below 10 MPH), the rear drums would squeak.

 

1. put the rear adjuster back to where it was.

2. work the parking brake lever several (dozens!) of times in order to turn the shoe adjuster and set properly. it's made to adjust for shoe thickness and will adjust itself every time you use the parking brake. when you screw it all the way back in doing a brake job, it'll have to make 10-15 turns to get back to where it should be, and to get a full turn on the threads, it will require you to pull the parking brake lever several times, as there are about 8-10 teeth per turn on the adjuster, and it can only move 2 teeth at a time due to design. Soooo, you'll have to pull that handle literally zillions of times to get it set again properly.
Make sense?

btw.. the squeal WILL come back. I put new drums and OEM pads on mine and they came back about 3 weeks later. you'l have to convert to discs to get rid of the noise.

 

i thought braking in reverse adjust the drums.

 

on some cars it does, but not on Maximas.

 

Thanks for the writeup