A Few Good Whacks...

I stopped by Harbor Freight on my way home recently to see what kind of tools I could use to remove the brake drum. On Harbor Freight's website, I had seen a bolt puller on sale so I thought I'd check that out. The store had numerous tools on sale, so I picked up the bolt puller and also picked up a 4 piece, 3-jaw puller set for $24.99. The jaw puller set came with 4 sizes of pullers: 8", 6", 4", and 2" and cheaper than anything I had seen online.

After arriving home, I realized I had no idea how to use the bolt puller and the 8" 3-jaw puller looked like it could work so gave that a shot. The 8" puller fit right over the brake drum but after a few rotations on the center bolt to force the pulling action, I could not turn it anymore. Frustrated with being stuck on a task the Haynes manual passed over quickly as a trivial task, I whacked the outer edge of the drum with a hammer a few times. I went back to turning the center bolt and found it to be super easy to turn and had figured that the jaws had probably slipped out of place, but upon closer inspection, I saw that the drum had popped off!

Under the drum:

I'm still in the process of disassembling and cleaning, but as I'm doing so, I'm using soap stone to mark on the new parts where springs and screws go (not all holes are used) so that I can avoid some confusion during reassembly.

P.S. - The nitrile gloves were great for this task - brake drums are filthy.