Do you kow anyone with a lathe that can swing the brakeplate complete with shoes ?

My re-lined MZ shoes were similarly tight, so I mounted the brake plate on a turned-in-situ mandrel and carefully turned the friction surfaces down with a carbide tipped tool concentric with the wheel spindle bore. The 160mm MZ brake plate fitted into my Myford Super 7. Care taken to cover the lathe bed to keep the friction material out of the wearing surfaces + avoid breathing the dust. I was rather suprised at the rate of wear on the tool, but managed the job OK.

Otherwise I would get some coloured chalk & chalk the drum wear surface. Insert the brake plate and spindle to centralise and align it to the drum & see where the chalk marks the shoes. Use a coarse file (or coarse emery cloth wrapped around a stiff piece of wood or flat metal bar) to remove the chalk marked areas. Repeat until you have the fit you want - you will have to actuate the brake lever as the fit gets easier to get a contact with the drum. Work slowly & remove small amounts of material each time to keep the shape of the shoes & get a good fit.

Used this method on an iron barrel Enfield 500 TLS brake to fit some Indian made shoes & also set up the linkage so that both shoes contacted together. Wokored fine but took pretty much a whole day, where the lathe route for the MZ only took an hour or so.

As well as chamfering the leading edges of the shoes I also habitually cut grooves at 45 degrees across the friction material to about half the depth of lining. Use 2 hacksaw blades mounted together in the saw frame to get a wider groove & put 3 or 4 grooves in each shoe, keeping well clear of the ends to leave large areas between the grooves. Came across this first in trials bikes where they were called "mud grooves", but they give dust somewhere to go in road bikes & can stop squealing due to dust build-up. IIRC EBC sell a range of shoes with these grooves already cut.

HTH

Nigel B.