Doing a thorough brake job on the valiant and I got a hardware kit from Oreily I believe it is a Brake Best H3707. Kit has all the exact springs but not the Pin Spring and Retainer Clip for the Hold down spring, instead it has what is pictured above, a tapered spring that i believe is supposed to go in the front of the shoe and the square clip that I assume comes through the inner hub, stretch the spring to hook on to it etc. But the problem is the hole in the inner hub is not big enough and I am leary about widening it because if the tapered spring has too much slack I would be screwed as the original pin heads may slip right through a larger hole. So I am trying to track down whats on there, has anyone encountered this problem or does any one have a part number for the original pin style hold down kit. I checked the parts list but most of whats listed there doesnt show up at any retailers. Thanks A Ton in Advance!!

"Brake Best"…?

What you got (under a made-up nonbrand) is an old and inferior type of brake shoe hold-down spring and anchor. It'll work (assuming the springs are the ~correct ones), but not as well, and it doesn't do as good a job of keeping water out of the brakes, either.

Assuming your are working on a car with 9" drums, see here for hardware kit info. Be prepared to learn that real parts cost a lot more than no-name crap…and prepared to understand how come as soon as you get the real parts and compare them to the rubbish.

Folks, our cars are old. So old they statistically don't exist any more on the roads. We are long past the point where it stopped being reasonable to expect to be able to walk into a local parts store (let alone a chain parts store) and buy top-quality, or even good-quality parts for our cars. Here and there you get lucky on occasion, but mostly not; of those parts you can still get at such a store, an overwhelmingly large and growing proportion of them are garbage of one kind or another.

One of the realities of owning an old car is that it requires stashing/hoarding parts for when you'll need them. Unless you're lucky enough to live near someplace like Old Car Parts Northwest, you have to plan ahead and go through the slower processes involved in finding and buying good parts, then tuck them away so you have them when you eventually need them. The alternative is to put up with the poor operation and safety threat caused by part-shaped trinkets, usually from parts of the world where quality is regarded as a cute Western fetish and specifications are regarded as a fun kind of toilet paper. That is not something I'm willing to do, especially not with life-safety equipment (like brake parts).

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Too many people who were born on third base actually believe they've hit a triple.

hi uncle dan- read your excellent and accurate editorial. also it is a fact now that the market for parts includes a growing group of shysters which requires more vigilance from old car afficianados. bet youre as good as me when it comes to spotting clip joints. maybe better. do you have the same size problem in canada as we do here in main street america. bet you do. give em hades(trying to reduce my vocabulary). btw that julep is still on my to do list. regards bob f