It started out as a normal morning doing some maintenance on my brother’s 2001 Honda CR-V.

The oil change went normally, nothing unusual to it, so I moved on to his rear brakes, which he had mentioned made some noise occasionally.

The right side drum came off really easily, but the the left side wasn’t so nice. Something had come loose inside, so the brake shoes were just holding the drum and keeping me from prying it off. It took several minutes and all the prying force I could generate, which caused me to punch myself in the face once, but I finally got it off, and in the process basically pulled everything apart, wrecking some parts.

I actually managed to rip half the friction material off one of the shoes. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to replace them, but now I did.

I went to the parts store to get new shoes and hardware, but when I got home to start putting it back together I noticed that I had bent the self-adjuster. This shows just how much force it took to get the drum off. Luckily the parts store had one in stock, so I got it finished the next day.

Unfortunately, while working on it, I managed to pop out the pistons of the wheel cylinders, which allowed air into the system, so I needed to bleed the brakes when I was all done. I only had my basic tool set that I keep in my car, so I didn’t have an 8mm wrench to loosen the bleeder, so I ended up driving to work, which is ten minutes away, just to grab one little wrench. But it bled really easily, and everything turned out fine in the end. The only thing I wished I could’ve done that I didn’t was replace the drums, but no parts shop in town seemed to stock the drums.

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-Dan