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The rear brakes are never easy. On a 4-wheel disk brake system, you typically have a parking brake that is a "mini drum brake" on the inside of the rotor. The relative novice DIYer is fine, provided you don't need to replace the rotor. But removing the rotor, with that mini-drum brake, is a royal pain in the butt.
An exception is the Subaru Legacy around MY 92 - rears are the same as the front, pull back caliper bolt, swing up, drop old pads, push pistons back (or do that first if you prefer) put in new pads, swing back down, put in rear caliper bolt and torque it. Bada bing, bada boom.
That is, of course, if you don't need to replace the rotor...even then 90% of the job is possession of the correct puller.
Older VW rear drums are not that tough. Air cooled bugs, with manual adjusters (and MG-B for that matter) are way easy.
A tip: (and I see I am hardly the first to say this) get both back wheels off the ground, pull both road wheels and drums. Then dis-assemble ONLY ONE side, keeping the other side as a model of how it goes back together. Particularly if the job stretches over a couple weekends, it's not always so obvious. At least not for me.
And, so, yeah, I was where you are about 35 years ago, not wanting to work on brakes because "a mistake could get me killed". The answer to this is to work carefully, in fact I am way more inclined to trust my own brake work than a shop's. I spend quite a lot of time inspecting and checking stuff, and I know exactly how worn a part needs to look before I want to replace it.
Brakes are not hard. You can definitely do a better job than the chain garages will in general do. Finish off by bleeding the brakes, not because you necessarily need to get air out, but because it will get clean dry fluid in the system. Think about doing a bleed on your clutch if it's a juice clutch, while you have the tools out.
Particularly with 4-wheel disc, make damn sure you pump the brake pedal - using short strokes, don't push the pedal and master cylinder beyond normal travel - before you try to move the car. This can take a dozen or more strokes. Don't be coasting towards your shop wall while you are doing this. If you screw up remember the hand brake.
An exception is the Subaru Legacy around MY 92 - rears are the same as the front, pull back caliper bolt, swing up, drop old pads, push pistons back (or do that first if you prefer) put in new pads, swing back down, put in rear caliper bolt and torque it. Bada bing, bada boom.
That is, of course, if you don't need to replace the rotor...even then 90% of the job is possession of the correct puller.
Older VW rear drums are not that tough. Air cooled bugs, with manual adjusters (and MG-B for that matter) are way easy.
A tip: (and I see I am hardly the first to say this) get both back wheels off the ground, pull both road wheels and drums. Then dis-assemble ONLY ONE side, keeping the other side as a model of how it goes back together. Particularly if the job stretches over a couple weekends, it's not always so obvious. At least not for me.
Yep, yep and yep.
There were also some late-80s GM cars with rear disk brakes that weren't bad to work on.
And I have no idea how many hundreds of times I might have been in and out of an old AC Bug, fiddling with the front drum brake adjusters!
That said, I think one of the main problems with rear drum brakes is that, by the time most people have any idea they're bad, they're REALLY bad. Stuff is just destroyed in there. Also, very few people have the simple tools that make drum brakes a hundred-fold easier to fix.
I was, for the most part, an office worker for the past 30 years but I have done my own brakes for the past 40 years. I've even done mechanical brakes.
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