Hi David, the answer to your question is that Scotts weren`t interested in reality all they were interested in was having something that could improve sales and the brake probably looked better with rear facing brake levers so that was the way it came out of the works, the whole question of motorcycle brakes is of one maker copying another and not even questioning the technology because the performance was adequate for the time. Car makers on the other hand knew that their motorcycle type brakes were useless in the 1920s and needed a serious upgrade hence the adoption of servo type brakes where the shoes could centralise themselves. The best advice for motorcycle brakes is to centralise the brakeplate before locking up the spindle but this is impossible to do in most cases as 9 times out of 10 the brakeplate has its centre hole exactly the same size as the spindle and this stops the shoes moving on to centre to give best performance, so my advice is apart from turning brakeplates around, bore out the spindle hole in the brakeplate and allow the shoes to centralise properly, without doing this you might only have a small percentage of the brake lining touching the drum. Alan Noakes. scottworkshop@hotmail.co.uk
