i hated to but had to turn drums because the linings delaminated. my worst drum is now 12.015. i think this is still ok. upon tryin to adjust front shoes, i can get the rear shoe on the driver side to contact drum but cant forward
drum to contact drum no matter where i position the arrow located on the eccectrinc cam or pivot bolt. i put new everything and am wondering if i should completley bleed system and then adjust. i bought parts from roberts in mass.
they come highly recommended so it must be something im doing
wrong.

are you sure the cam has not come loose on the adjuster bolt...??bleeding the brakes has nothing to do with the setting of the brake pads i have a friend with a regent and one of the adjuster cams brook loose from the adjuster, and caused us some problemd there..

I am not 100% sure of your vehical but most drums should not be turned to more than .060 over the drum diameter. So, if your drum was 11 inch the maximum diameter would be 11.060

Many drums of later years have the max dia. stamped into the outside of the drum. I do not know if they did that for 1952 though.

i decided to move on to the other 3 wheels. i positioned the arrows towards the wheel cylinders on the front and towards each other on the rear. the drums wont even start to fit on the shoes to start. im beginning to think i need to pre grind shoes to fit. i think i can go to autozone and borrow one of those grinders.(im laughing while banging my head on the ground.) for some reason i thought just replacing shoes wasnt goin to be easy. when the drums wont even fit when cams are fully inboard what do i do. i cant turn the drums to fit. is it possible i got oversize padded shoes from roberts? i think this is the first brake job on the car for it only has 54k original miles. are the rear brake shoes different from the front shoes or are they identical. from what i have checked they are identical but at this point who knows.

there is also an upper and lower adjustment bolt on the front drums (dual wheel cylinders) the rears have two adjuster at the bottom (single wheel cylinder) that will also allow you to move the whole shoe in and out, loosen the large nut on the back and turn the cam.. ideally they had a test drum you installed which had cutouts in the front you could put feeler guages throught to set the dimensions, the Packard drums have a small cutout about a 1/2 inch long in the face you can slide a feeler guage through..

Check the parts from Roberts against the ones you took off. I had the same problem on a friend's 52 DeSoto last year. The drums would not go on. We turned the drums and checked the shoes. After two days of frustration I checked against the old parts and found out they had sent the wrong parts. The shoes were OK but the other parts in the kit were too long! A phone call to Roberts resulted in a quick shipment of the right parts and the job was finished in an hour. Lesson - don't assume the parts shipped are correct.