I'm just curious, how rare do you think front drums on 1972 cars are? Mine has them, and it was the last year of Cutlass to have front drums.

 

Rare enough that the parts do not sell well and are sold cheap!
I just saw front drum brake hoses at RA for 66 cents apiece...

 

Funny, I just bought a couple of those hoses for my 72, never know when I'll need em!

I dunno about you guys, but my front drums stop pretty darn well. Mind you they have new everything on them.

 

My guess that they were more common than you think. I bet alot of low end 4-doors and 2 doors had them. Also when someone restores a car they put discs on it more likely than not. IMO

Larry

 

Unless you want to keep it original with all those 23 pounds of beautiful rotating intertia :P

 

Mine worked great, you just never knew which way you'd pull under braking. Switched to disc's 11 years ago. Money well spent IMHO.

 

My 72 442 vert I'm doing has front drums - a real pain in the *** to properly restore everything. Disc brake cars are so much easier to do.

 

I have had two 72 Cutlass convertibles and they both came with drum brakes. I have a disc conversion. I just need the time to do it.

 

So it's Normal for drum brakes to pull a tad to one side? My car definitely stops well. But it pulls a tad to the left. Makes me nervous if there's ever a layer of snow on the ground...

 

Not rare at all. Olds produced Power Drum brakes on Cutlass models from about July 71 until around Dec 71. Then they started equipping them with discs as a standard feature. Some of the high performance cars from 68-71 were produced with disc brakes as part of the option list, but the vast majority of them were drums. That's another reason why you see a lot of 'Disc Brake Conversion" kits out there. We had 2 1972 Cutlass S cars. One was built in Nov of 71; it had drums. The other was March 72 (the one I kept) and it has discs.

You won't have any problem finding drums, shoes or brake components for a drum brake car from the 60, 70's.

 

i see what you mean about which way will it pull this time? my 70 tends to pull to the right but occasionally it will pull to the left.
i agree they are effective, i have no intentions of changing mine over to disc... the only time i notice mine pull is when i brake agressively.

 

My 72 Supreme Convertible has them and I never even thought to ask or check when I bought the car, not that that would have stopped me. I bought new everything when I rebuilt them and they still pull left ofr right, and you never know. And then the next time, they stop straight as an arrow. But beware if you drive through deep water. You will have NO BRAKES! You need to stand on them several times HARD before they even begin to work again. If you wait until you need them it's too late. The shape of the drum and the centrifical force keeps the water in the drum (knid of like swinging a full bucket of water over your head), whereas it blows off immediately on disks. I guess there were still a good number of people back in 1972 that didn't trust those "new fangled" disk brakes things they were pushin'.

 

Wow, I did notice the pull with the front drums, I thought my alignment was off or something! Thanks for sharing that about the high water, you may have saved me from an accident.

 

I have production figures and can give you a definitive answer to that question.
Of the F-85 series:
35.7% had the power disc brakes
48.5% had power drum brakes
That leaves about 15% with manual brakes.

What we "think" doesn't really matter.

 

Kurt, where did you get the production info? It matches what I've been told all along but that's all been just word of mouth. This is the first time I've seen the 'stats'.