I tried another idea on making the brakes stick out of the wheel less.
PICTURE This is the single wheel drum slid over top of the dual type hub, not behind it like it was intended to go.
It fits but not piloted well, a little more slop than I would want.
PICTURE I'm not sure if a different year hub might fit tighter, sort of doubt it.
Also, this lets the drum cover up all of the hub pilot and you'd then be stuck using single wheels as they are stud piloted. This would not be a good idea with dual type wheels that need to be hub piloted. Further complicated is the drum won't even fit and mate flat inside dual wheel.
If the hub fit the drum snug and if you plan to run single wheels there is one nice thing about the idea. If you used the dual hubs on a single wheel axle housing (with the backing plate flanges welded on the axle measuring 50-5/8" across). Then you'd only need 7/16" spacers between backing plates and the flanges.
The increase in wheel mounting surface by installing the drums outside the hubs is 0.788".
The hub fit could be addressed by turning off the pilot and fitting a sleeve with the correct OD.
If taking the sleeve approach I suppose you could do this with the original deep 13x3.5" drums (should fit in the wheel) and make that sleeve long enough to support the ID of dual wheels. However this does not result in a convenient backing plate position relative to any flange on the axle. For dual wheels instead of all that trouble I'd go back to the idea of a shallow drum on the back side of the hub and a 1.25" spacer as discussed in an earlier post.
All that rambling in case someone else has the same idea and is curious about the answers.
I don't plan to follow through with these ideas, in fact I don't think I'll be using drums at all at this point.
Grigg
