Drum brake knocking noise? Options

[lagos]

I recently replaced the drum brakes and shoes on my girlfriends Corolla. After the repair, the right rear side has an audible knocking/thumping sound that only happens when you press on the brake. You can also feel the thumping through the brake pedal.

Anyone run into this issue before? I pulled the drum off and everything looked fine. My only guess is that there is something going on with the adjuster. Either is not working correctly, or I didn't adjust it out enough?

[lagos]

I don't know about slamming in reverse, but the spring does re-tension (reset?) when reversing.

I don't really see how that works. Looking at the shoes, it seems like when you press the brakes, the little adjuster moves with the shoe and gets incremented by one notch at a time so that when you let go of the brake, it is as close to the drum as possible without touching. This would work the same way in both forward or reverse operation.

Now that I think about it, I believe the problem is that those adjusters are fairly old and not well lubricated, so they are just not incrementing as they should. If I just pull the drum off and make the adjustment tighter, the noise should go away but would probably eventually come back as the shoe wears down over time.