308 Rear Barkes

I am in the home stretch of a longgggg rebuild of the suspension and brakes of my 308 ('79). Everything is back in place except the rear brake pads. I had the calipers rebuilt by PMB and everything is clean and shiny. I purchased an ATE pad accessory kit that contains new pins and spring clips. The issue is the new pins are not machined properly. The nipple on the end is not long enough (or in reality, the major diameter of the pin at the end is not turned down soon enough) so the pin does not seat properly. It does not slide in far enough to uncover the hole for the spring clip that retains the pin. I hate to put the old corroded ones back on. Has anyone run into this problem? Is my only solution to turn down the end of the pin a few mm on a lathe to allow the pin to seat fully?

I was looking forward to having the brakes done this weekend, now it's getting pushed out some more!



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Thanks for the advice, guys. I will give PMB a call.

 

My final solution was to reuse the originals after reconditioning them. I tried twice to have a friend at work machine the replacements down a little. First we tried machining down the end so the nipple would seat further in. There was still interference and the pin would not seat far enough. next, we tried taking some off the top, thick end by cutting down the bottom of the shoulder. The pin would not go in far enough to uncover the hole where the hair pin needs to fit in. So I gave up rather than keep iterating. I decided to reuse my original parts.

Here is what my originals looked like after de-greasing:
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I put them in tumbler for 24 hours hoping to really get the corrosion off and they came out a little better, but not clean enough:
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Next, I put them in the chuck of an electric drill and used some sandpaper to clean them while turning in the drill. Here is what they looked like at this point:
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Some spots remained where the brake pad sat on the pin, but I decided to leave it alone. I next zinc plated them twice, doing a plate-polish-plate-polish procedure.
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The metal comes out of the plating solution dull gray. Polishing them with #0000 steel wool yields the result on the left.
The originals had a gold chromate finish, so after the plating process I dipped them in a chromate solution to get them close to the original finish. I think I left them in the solution a little longer than necessary and they came out a little darker than the originals, but I can live with that. After a while they are going to get grungy with brake dust and road debris anyway. But, at least they will have some corrosion protection.
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This is what the finished product looks like. The one on top is the replacement. One can see the machined areas, they are silver instead of gold. These machined areas would have to be plated or painted to prevent them from corroding. I figured if I have to do that anyway, I may as well just stop working on them and restore my originals. The materials for plating are cheap and readily available. The most expensive piece would be the power supply, which I already had. Best of all, when I was done, they fit!

Next, onward to fix the leaking brake line!