Tim Livingstone, fleet, facilities and fuel manager at Kriska Transportation Group: This back here is the drum. So, it’s a big piece of metal, looks like a bowl inside the wheel. Back here, if you take a look through the peephole; you can see that this is the brake lining that we want to be inspecting. And as you can see, we have lots of pad there.

So, at the very top, you can see that’s the metal shoe. And then this is the friction material that we want to be working with. We can see that it’s thick, that it’s more than a quarter inch, that there’s no cracks, there’s no contamination, and that we have proper brakes.

If we back up here and take a look here, this is the slack adjuster. These are the clevis pins that we spoke about. And you want to make sure that their cotter pins are in and that they’re able to turn. Right now the brakes are applied so that one’s not going to turn. And this is what makes the automatic adjustment work. So very key to make sure that that is there.

This here is your brake chamber. We’re going to want to make sure that the brake chamber is solid and in place, that the air lines are properly routed, that they’re all tied up and nothing is rubbing. We can’t see any marks through the lines all the way back to the air tank.

And then here we have a brake stroke indicator bolted on. So it’s something that you know, our companies can do after the fact, spec’ it with, and if you look directly at the chamber or the field goal post, you’ll see that this is on the inside. Right now it’s in a parked setting, so we know that we’re not past this. So that’s good.

When we’re gonna ask the driver to release the brakes, we’ll see and watch the application come back, and we should be in line with the first mark. We’re going to go ahead and ask the driver to release the brakes for us. Release the brakes!

So now, as the air applies to the brake chamber, we’ll see that now we’re in a forward position. Now we know the brakes are released, and if we look at it, we know that we’re lined up.

So this is where we’re going to want to take our measurements from. We can do it from there. We can also do it if we had a marker or a chalk. We would mark here to be able to say that, okay, this is our starting mark, and that we can see that now the slack adjuster is pushed forwards in a forward position, and we would do that to all four wheels, right?

Now I’m going to ask the driver to go ahead and step on the brake, and we’re going to watch, now it’s going to be relatively quick. It’s going to push backwards, which is going to now push the pad and the shoe, or the shoe to the drum and make a contact so that we can have a stopping force.

Brake! As you can see, we’ve now travelled backwards a little bit, but not past our maximum, and we know that we’re in the middle. We can see that we have a brake that are now making contact with the drum. It’s kind of hard to see with the dust cover on, but it is touching.

And now listening. We’re listening that we have no air leaks coming from any one of the chambers. If you take a look, there’s little holes that are on the side of the chambers, and oftentimes that’s where you’ll hear it leaking.

Between this and this, or this hole here and this band clamp here, but as you can hear right now, there is no air leak. All the chambers and brakes are in the center. If you want to take a look, they’re all doing the same thing.

And then I’m going to have the driver come off the brakes now, and we’re going to watch it come back. Off! And now we know that the brakes are perfectly set.

And then we’ll have him set the brakes. If we want to just back up, because it’ll be a little bit loud. And so what this is going to do is it’s going to purge the air out of the brake chambers and reset the parking brake.

Set the brake! And now, as you can see, it’s dumped the air out of the brake chambers, and now all four brakes are back in a parked position.

Nasir Ali, driving instructor at Commercial Heavy Equipment Training: First thing … this is a disc brake. What I will check for … first thing I will check that my air lines, I just supplied air to the trailer, and I want to make sure that there are no leaks on all the airlines.

The first thing I will check is the physical components of the disc brake, the caliper, and the disc itself. Because I have my trailer secured with chocks on the other side, I will check that my rotors do not have any cuts or any fine lines.

So, what I will do, I will just touch it, basically, this looks good. I’ll also check it on the side that they are not fully rusted and no physical damages on them. The caliper looks good.

And I will also check, let me see if I can see here. I will check the pads. I will also check the pads. The pads, they have a good thickness on them, right? That’s basically about it.

So also, while I’m at it, I’m also looking at if there are any other leaks coming from the wheel seals or from the hub. This is good. And I will do the same on all the other [wheels].