Is it normal or acceptable for the brake shoe to rub on the inner lining of the wheel drum?
Just put on shoes and they rub when I spin the wheel by hand in neutral. I was concerned of friction causing to much heat or some other damage.
Thanks for your help, Bob
You mean a slight drag? Are the shoes new? They don't make much contact with the drum especially if their new without a chance to wear in a bit. You'll wear off the high spots and they'll actually work better because they'll fit the drum more closely. If it's too much drag pull the wheel. You'll see where their hitting with the wheel/drum off and sand the high spots a little. Easier still, can you loosen the adjustment and get less drag?
Ideally there should be no rubbing, but when you put in new lined shoes there may be some minor rubbing until you've used the brakes some as emergency brakes and worn them in..
You may have a problem with worn hubs, though, causing the hubs and drums to go too far in - this can be fixed with a shim between the axle and the hub or ideally with better hubs. Most important is to have good keyways in both hub and axle, if the keyway is wider than the key the hubs will move and loosen up/become more worn.
After putting a rear wheel back on the axle you have to check the torque after some driving - sometimes several times or until the torque stays at 100 lb.ft.
It's probably good practice to check, and if necessary, re-adjust the length of your emergency brake rods after installing new shoes, the Ford procedure is on page 25 (paragraph 75) of the service manual.
I used a slightly different procedure on my car - I wanted to make sure that the brakes were fully released with the brake lever in high (fully forward), plus I didn't want the brake rods to prevent the lever from moving fully forward.
So, I set the brake lever fully forward and stuck a piece of wood in the slot to ensure it stayed that way, then I adjusted my brake rods so that the front pin slipped in easily with the rear brake levers in their fully relaxed position (brake cam horizontal).
After everything was back together, I checked the operation of the emergency brake to make sure that the rear wheels would lock up with the brake lever pulled back beyond neutral.