how to remove the brake rotor

Hi guys!!!

I'm trying right now to fix my parking brake and to put new brake shoes inside. After a while we got the left brake fixed (we removed the tire, the caliper, the rotor and then we changed the brake shoes). Now we want to do the right side so we removed the tire, then we removed the caliper and then we tried to remove the rotor. But the rotor is stuck on the axle hub. We dried to hammer against the rotor but the thing doesn't move at all. We drilled the original rivet out but the rotor still doesn't move. It looks like the rotor is rusted and stucked on the axle hub.
Any suggestions???

thanks

-zschunky

I would say either soak it with penetrating liquid and then ppound it out. Or heat it up (the hub area) and then pound it out

Smack the face of the drum part of the rotor between the studs after its soaked for awhile. If the rotor is rusted to the flange that should get it free. Make shure that the parking brake shoes are not in some way engaged they could also hold the rotor on.

Andreas,

I just completed that chore about a month ago, but didn't run into the problem you have. The right side came apart fairly easily (except for one caliper bolt that was a P.I.T.A.) as the rivets had already been drilled out. The left side took a little more work because I also had to drill out the rivets before being able to pull the rotor off. As mentioned above, penetrating oil, heat, and a B.F.H. (big freaking hammer) are about your best options. Just don't get too zealous with the hammer as you might cause some damage to the bearings on that side.

If you haven't already done so, disconnect the parking brake cable to see if that helps free up the rotor. My cable was pretty well gunked up with rust and undercoating over spray. Dousing the inards of the parking brake with penetrating oil might help free up the few moving parts that are in there. You can clean everything up fairly well with brake cleaning spray once you get it all apart.

And as long as you've got things torn apart I'd recommend opening up the calipers to see what kind of shape the inards are in. I was surprised to see how much sludge build up there was in mine. Rebuilding them was pretty easy, messy, but easy. I also replaced the flexible brake lines (from the frame to the trailing arms) to eliminate another possible failure point.

Good luck...!!!

thanks for your help, guys

and finally we took the rotor off. It took us 15 minutes this time (yesterday we tried to remove it for about 2 hours). I got a puller from a collegue and we put it on the rotor and that it was pushing against the axle. Then we heated the rotor up for a while and pounded against the rotor and then rotor got loose. And that's how we got this thing off. I got quite late today and so I hope we get the car ready by tomorrow.

-zschunky