Rubbish rear brakes!!

Hi
hope someone cane help, im beating my head against a wall now.
My car failed its MOT on very poor rear brake reading on both hand and foot brake, i fitted new shoes, cylinder and cleaned up the brakes and bleed the system. i have adjusted the shoes and the hand brake is working fine but the foot brake is still rubbish?
any ideas what it could be?
cheers

The self adjusting rears, don't! You need to take off the wheel, back off the handbrake, then poke a long thin thing through one of the wheel bolt holes, and manually persuade the little wedge down a bit. If you really can't poke or find it in the hole, you can remove the rear drum, normally works well enough so long as you haven't worn them and created a lip. If you can just squeeze the drum back on, and just about turn it by hand but with noises as it scrapes against the shoes, that's good enough (but make sure both sides give the same resistance). Then readjust handbrake, you can do them well enough so its off with lever down but solidly on with one click!

Hi
Cheers for the advice, but i have already done this and no change, have they got a brake balance control fitted on the mk1? could this be the problem?
cheers

Mine failed on the same thing! I'm in the process of replacing the shoes and cylinder's just to be certain. How do you adjust the handbrake tho??
Do you know if your shoes are wearing evenly??

phantom750 said

Hi
Cheers for the advice, but i have already done this and no change, have they got a brake balance control fitted on the mk1? could this be the problem?
cheers

Mine failed on poor rear brakes. Has your car been lowered and does it have a brake compensator (spring unit just in front of NSR wheel). These need adjusting to take the slack up in the spring if your car has been lowered. Worth checking !