51 Brake drums

[E Rutherford]

I have a customer that owns a 51 Coupe. He brought in some drums and shoes for me to arc from the car. I said to myself, "these are VW" drums and shoes." I have never seen a "finned" front drums before, so maybe?? I have an original 54 shop manual. All photos show lug nut studded drums. I can safely say that 53 and later definitely had lug nut studded drums, but can't say that for any car earlier than 53. So did the 51 have the same drum brake setup as the 53 and later (56,57, 58 etc.)?

[Brad Ripley]

Below are illustrations out of the earliest Pre-a Parts Catalog showing complete drums with alum rings and also the rings available as a spare part.

These guys http://www.oldtimeroldspeedclub.org/201 ... rings.html apparently have some connection to the maker of these reproduction VW "performance brake parts". Anybody know who is actually making/selling these things?

[E Rutherford]

Tom Birch was nicest enough give me a call and verified my thoughts. Up through 52, brakes were exclusively VW with a few twists. The cooling fins were a one year deal only, late 51 to early 52.

[Martin Benade]

Those brakes did have the Porsche wheel cylinders for a dual leading shoe setup, unlike the VW

[James Davies]

Hi Ed,

If you look in your March 1953 Porsche spare parts book, there are 2 diagrams showing the braking system for the 356.

Illustration XII on page 66 shows the system used up through Sep 1952 which utilized a mixture of standard VW parts and some Porsche-specific parts. The illustration shows the Porsche-specific parts - wheel cylinders, front backing plates (as Martin notes above), etc.

Illustration XIII on page 72 (which Brad has shown above) shows the "Oversize" brakes introduced for the 1953 model year production cars (but already in use on many competition cars in 1952). For these brakes, almost everything is Porsche.

In 1954, Porsche also published a small "VW spare parts applicable to Porsche cars" booklet. Unfortunately this didn't list any of these old brake parts. So the documentation is thin.

If you can fill us all in on what Tom Birch told you, that would be very useful.

And those aluminum finned sleeves were used through late '52, basically until they switched to the larger aluminum brake drums.