Been dissatisfied with the brake performance on my FJ62 for sometime now. Going from 33s to 34s and now 35s made it simple to assume that the mostly stock brakes were just being over-leveraged by the bigger, heavier tires/wheels. With BVB's assistance, all regular maintenance items have been checked - fresh brake fluid, system bled properly, drums adjusted, lspv adjustment experimented with, etc. with some improvement noticed but still lackluster stopping performance. Nothing dangerous but with the FJ80 non-ABS master cylinder, V6 mini-truck booster, DBA rotors w/ OEM pads up front and OEM drums with NAPA shoes it just seemed that better performance could be had. I decided to go back to OEM shoes in the rear and installed those today. After a slight hiccup, wrong shoes in the right parts number box - a situation CDan calls "improperly integrated", I got the right shoes in but before installation, I measured the lining length differences on the old NAPA vs. new OEM shoes just for grins. A quite telling measurement, as it turned out. Each NAPA shoe lining length was 2-1/4" shorter than OEM. What the.....??? The OEMs had a total of 9" more brake lining surface area X 2-3/8" width than the NAPAs for the rear axle. It will probably take some time to get the new shoes bedded in but already, firmer braking is noticeable. Maybe the OEMs cost a bit more than the NAPAs but it looks like, in this case, you get what you pay for.
As an aside, I got the incorrectly boxed shoes from Stevinson but they made good by next day air freighting the right ones in today. It's all good when you go with OEM.
As an aside, I got the incorrectly boxed shoes from Stevinson but they made good by next day air freighting the right ones in today. It's all good when you go with OEM.
