{Drum to Disc How-to}
{Converting J-body drums to Neon disc brakes}
This is a how to for doing the rear disc conversion for the J-body.
The first thing you want to do is to jack the car up, use jackstands to keep the car from falling on you, and to be safe.
Once your car is up in the air, remove the wheels from the rear axle to begin.
When the cars wheels are off, remove the drum by just pulling it off and toward you. You may have to use a screwdriver to be able to help it off or in some situations, you'll have to use a hammer to be able to knock off the rust that may be holding the drom onto thehub. When you've got the drum off, the next thing you need to do is locate these springs at the top of the drum assembly so that you can remove them from the hub with vice grips.
Here you see me point at the two you''ll be removing first. This will be at the top of the drum assembly.
With a set of vice grips, hold the spring as shown to remove the spring that is on top of the other spring. You'll have to pull pretty hard to be able to get it off but if you set your vice grips good enough, you won't have to worry about them slipping. Once removed, set the spring to the side but not removing it.
Do the second spring the same way as you did the first spring as shown..
This is what is should look like once you have them removed.
Next, you want to go to the retainers as shown and remove these. If you look at them carefully, you'll note that there's a pin that comes through the backing plate.
The best and easiest way to remove these, especially since they're tensioned with a spring, is to use your thumb over the whole retainer. Push the retainer down with your thumb while holding the pin on the opposite side . While doing this, rotate the retainer either clockwise or counterclockwise about 90 degrees or until the retainer releases from the pin.
It's not hard to do and may take you a time or two but this has always worked best for me for most cars I've worked on. Just remember to hole the pin tightly against the back of the backing plate to keep it from moving while you're pushing down on the retainer and twisting it 90 degrees.
This is what it should look like removed.
Do both retainers you see the same way.
The next thing you'll want to do is to remove the self adjusting tensioner which will then remove the brake shoe assembly from the hub.
Here is where you want to pull toward you the tensioner. By pulling, you'll then be able to remove the brakes. Pull only the bright tab you see me pointing to. Just pull it toward you and it'll release.
Once the tensioner is removed from the bottom of the drum assembly, you then want to remove the shoes from the backing plate. They should still be in place if all goes well and in some cases, may already have fallen down. If not, take the two top halves of the shoes (where I'm pointing), and separate them by pulling them apart from each other. It'll all just fall to the ground by now.
Here you'll see the entire assembly about to fall off of the backing plate and hub.
Here is the assembly removed from the hub assembly.
The last thing you want to do is remove the clip from the e-brake and you're done with this part of the project.
This is what it should look like once it's all removed.
The next page will show how to remove the hub assembly, backing plate, and prepare for the Neon backing plate to be installed.
