Ariel Owners Motorcycle Club

I want to share with this photo of the rear brake plate of my 1938 VH. This is how the brake shoes looked like when I bought the bike many years ago. I wonder what happened to the former owner? At least he seemed to have used the bike like that for a while maybe due to unavailability of replacement parts. One of the shoes wore into the brake drum.

Regards Klaus

Ariel brake shoes dont like damp conditions,Hope you have replacements

Dave

Hi Dave,
yes I have replaced them instantly!.
Thanks
Klaus

Note the lack of rivets in the brake shoes.

See separate thread, but it confirms my policy of NEVER running without rivets on Ariel brake shoes.

hi it is not the lack of rivets it is the alloy that has had its day and breaks and it turns to dust , i have got my rear brake shoes adjuster that has just lost its thread to adjust the shoes it just turning to dust

I think the bike was being used at a time when spares were unobtainable
and I think the corrosion happened after the failure and not before.

There has been a previous similar failure to the trailing shoe which has
been repaired. The brake shoes have had new linings riveted on at least
once leaving a number of redundant rivet holes in the shoes. It is these
rivet holes which seem to be the site of the failure.

I don't think that either failure would have been catastrophic. The
first one was repaired and, in the second, the shoe only seems to have
suffered the fracture. The brake lining would have tended to keep things
in place so the rider may not have felt any more than the pedal moving
further than usual and the bike perhaps not slowing down quite as much
as expected. There may also have been an amount of noise.

The action of the brake cam would have moved the shoe against the drum
until it could go no further being stopped by the brake lining. The part
of the shoe not restrained by the lining would then tend to bend at the
point at the edge of the lining and subsequently failed under tension.

Thanks for your interesting comments.
This bike has been sold new in 1938 as a new bike in munich. I allways wondered that this was possible in those days. I bought the bike arround 20 years ago. The bike came with original german registration documents. It was last on the road arround 1962. After I bought the Ariel I was curious why the rear wheel did hardly turn when I tried to push it into my garage. What had happened was that the broken part of the upper brakeshoe (in the photo) ground into the brake drum and left very deep scares in it. The brake drum was bejond use. So I guess when a former owner did the last kilometers he had no possibility to buy new repacement brake shoes at that time.

I remember that many years ago the Deutsches Museum in Munich had a pre-war closed-head VH on display with an original plaque from a Munich dealership. There was also at least one ohc Square Four engine. It's not impossible that the museum also got some paperwork that is now buried in their archives.