Inspecting rear brakes

[cayuse]

I had a funny 'knocking' sound coming from somewhere under my seat last week that caused a bit of concern(!).

As I pulled away from a stop I would get a somewhat regular 'knocking' sound in 1st and 2nd gear. Sometimes I thought I could actually feel it!
The frequency was very low so I figured it had almost no chance of coming from my engine (lot of wishful thinking going on) but was somehow coming from my rear wheel or chain, or maybe the cush drive. Then I paced out the travel the bike does for one chain revolution and the knocking sound seemed to match up with this distance. So, I became fairly certain it had something to do with my chain. In very short order I had the bike up on the stand and set about checking and lubing all the links.

Now, while I had it up on the stand I thought "you've never looked at the rear brakes, or the cush insert, and the rear brakes have been squeeling for awhile, so why not check that out now?"
Turns out the basic wooden jack stand (see another thread for that) doesn't lift the rear high enough to fully disengage the rear wheel so I used a hydraulic jack under the frame just behind the engine to carefully raise the bike another couple of inches so i could add some wooden blocks to the stand.

The rest was way easier than I imagined. I just disengaged the brake cable from the brake cam lever and spun off the axle nut. I put a 2x4 under the tire to take the weight off the axle and simply pulled it out. Knocking out the 2x4 let the tire fall to the floor. The axle spacers fell to the floor at this point too. Now, I could slide the wheel around enough to pull off the sprocket drum and brake 'panel' and have a look.

This is what it looked like:


The brake assembly just pulls out:


As does the sprocket drum:


The brake drum looks great. I cleaned out some powder that had accumulated.


The cush insert looked fine and there is plenty of life left in the shoes:


Of course, if I had wanted to change shoes or the cush insert I would have had to undo the wheel from the torque link and wrestled it out from under the fender. Maybe a second set of hands is advisable that point.

As it was, I was satisfied with what I saw so I put it back together. It all went back together just as easily, but I hurried it a little and forgot one of the axle 'washers', pulled the axle back out and upon re-installing realized I had one of the spacers in backwards, so pulled the axle out again. So, I actually rebuilt the assembly three times. Lots of practice! Reminds of the first time I adjusted the valves!

All of this is pretty much explained in the service manual, but I thought it would be good for the fellow newbies to see some real photographs and hear from another newb firsthand.

Oh yeah, and the knocking? GONE! I think my chain was telling me something like "LUBE ME!".
And, the rear brakes don't squeal anymore. So, a good bit of service work accomplished.

Cheers!