Winter, to set or set your brakes gamble! Frozen brakes.

I'm a little surprised I didn't see "pour some isopropyl into the air lines". While that used to be common practice, doing it on modern equipment will result in an abs light in 500-1,000 miles.

 

Any amount is too much. Isopropyl destroys the valves in the ABS module.

 

Sounds kinda silly like those old autos that had a clutch for starting.....then it acted as a 9 speed auto...

 

I am surprised how many truck drivers don't realize this and go at beating the crap out of their brake shoes.

Backing up on a tractive surface will loosen up one brake shoe ALWAYS. One shoe will try to climb the S-cam and pull free from drum. Now the other shoe in the drum may still be stuck but you're halfway, if not all the way there, as the other shoe will have enough force on it to break free now.

If you still have to free things up, I will disagree with the OP. First, don't use a 'dead blow' hammer. You need a solid metal hammer to ring that drum. Vibrations from a metal hammer is what fractures the ice crystals. Secondly you don't need to beat the crap out of the shoes, ringing the drum any random place will do fine almost all the time.

I would say just backing up will get it done 90-99 % of the time.

Back up, ring the drums, back up and you'er done - 99.999% of the time.

 

they don’t ever stick to the rotors? I’ve got discs on front of my truck but of course those don’t have parking brakes.

 

an underpowered small bore engine won’t last nearly as long either as a bigger high hp one running at a fraction of its maximum output most of the time. I’d rather pay up front for that and have it last twice as long (plus resale value is always better). And it just makes the truck less of a chore to drive than an underpowered boat anchor that can’t keep up with traffic.

 

They never stuck when I ran disc brakes. I'd like to see what others say.

 

We’ve never had them stick.

 

I only had to beat trailers brakes once. Learned my lesson. On the other hand, once shoes were froze to drums on my bobtail. I used a propane torch. It worked great. The ice had formed into ice chocks, I could see the blocks of ice. Torch was fast and easy. Always kept one in the Truck. Used it once on a dropped trailer I picked up. Seems to work better than the hammer, in my limited experience.