In your car's drum braking system, the wheel cylinder is crucial.
Its job is to apply brake shoes to your brake drums, causing your car to slow down.
But what is a wheel cylinder, exactly?
What could possibly go wrong with it, and more importantly, what can you do about it?
We'll go through the role of wheel cylinder in this post, as well as some typical issues with it.
What Is a Wheel Cylinder and How Does It Work?
The brake wheel cylinder is an important part of the drum braking system of your vehicle.
It is bolted to the drum brake backing plate and is located at the top of the wheel within the drum brake.
What is the purpose of it?
It's utilised to push a set of brake shoes outwards so they may make contact with a brake drum and slow your car down through friction.
What distinguishes this from a disc brake?
A disc brake calliper squeezes a brake pad onto either side of a spinning disc to slow the car down, unlike a drum brake wheel cylinder that applies a pushing force onto a brake shoe.
Are brake drums common?
While most current cars have disc brakes, it's still usual for an older car or small truck's rear tyres to have drum brakes.
Let's look through the structure of wheel cylinders now that we've covered the fundamentals. It will be easier for you to see how things may go wrong in the future.
If you check MOT history of your vehicle, a seized wheel cylinder could have been the reason for a MOT failure as this is the common problem with them.
What Is the Function ofa Wheel Cylinder?
The force created by your foot is transferred to the brake master cylinder when you compress the brake pedal.
The master cylinder then turns this force into hydraulic pressure, which is sent to each wheel cylinder through a brake line.