if both drums are hot, the shoes in the weak side could be dragging in one spot and not fully engaging. I have found 2 things that can cause Teds Floaters to not center correctly: One is that the lower edge of the roller cradle contacts the shoe before the rollers can completely nest in the cradle. It holds the shoe out against the drum. Looking at the rollers, they should be well seated in the cradle. If there is a gap, the shoes are not retracting and will drag on the drum. The solution is to grind the lower edge of the tip where it is contacting the shoe so that the shoe can move back to fully nest the rollers in the cradle. Then re- center the shoes following the instructions. Also check that the cotter pin is not interfering with the track, and that the roller pin is not too long and hanging up on the backing plate.
Another less common problem I have encountered (twice now) is with old backing plates having some poor repro tracks. The cradle Ted supplies is made so that with original Ford tracks, the cradle will move up and rest against the spring anchors ( rivets) when fully lifted, and also drop down a bit, the variation is to allow for the centering step. On the bad repros, the distance between the rivets and the anchor bolt hole in the track is greater that the original blueprint. The result is that the roller cradle cannot move all the way up to touch the bottom of the rivets, causing the lower shoe lining to contact and drag on the drum while the upper shoe, where the adjustment is, will not contact the drum because as you adjust it out, the shoe binds down by the activating wedge. In either case, the shoes will not center, so full brake shoe contact with the drum cannot be accomplished. If you have a centering tool, you can actually see how the shoes are sitting to verify if they are centered.
If your tracks are the bad repops, ( I suspect they are Ricks, as in both cases the cars had the tracks replaced in the 70's) the solution is to replace them with today's much better tracks. If you have an original or a known good one, measure the distance from the bottom of the rivets to the anchor bolt. The bad ones are about 3/32 too long. To get the anchor bolt in, someone would have had to file out the hole in the track or in the backing plate to get the anchor bolt to fully seat. It would have been easier to file the backing plate once the tracks were installed, which causes the shoes to be too low to be centered..
