I have a gen 1 - 1991 montero LS. I'm working on restoring it and when I got to the back brakes I ran into a huge problem - the drum backing plates are toast, every time I touch the rear passenger, chunks just come off - I'm surprised the wheel cylinder is still in place but they obviously haven't worked in a very long time (explains the super duper squish I experienced driving it home when I got it) .

Anyway - I've tried for a week and I cannot source backing plates - none of the yards around me have them and I've sent several requests to carparts.com - just for giggles, I also went ahead and placed orders through several of the "mitsu______parts.com" sites and as expected they all came back saying the part was not available.

So what do I do?!? I'm trying to keep it stock as possible - I've heard rumors about a disc conversion and I read the walk through someone posted on here but that's beyond my skills and both the shops I'm working with weren't willing to do that and also give me a clean inspection (and the goal is for it to be street legal at the end).

I'm in the kansas city MO area - I'm open to any ideas. I even had a moment of insanity and started looking for entire rear assemblies and couldn't even find one of those with the hubs attached - Let me know if you've had to deal with this or what you think I could do here. I'm already deep into this thing so it would need to be above 1k or so (without it also providing me with a new rear axle) for whatever the solution is to NOT make sense for me at this point.

Thanks guys - I've been a silent observer for a few months on here and all the info has been very helpful. This is the first thing I haven't been able to find on here yet though.

I'm assuming you are looking for MB500732 and MB500733. I believe the axle would need removed to get the backing plate off. This may keep a lot of places like car-part.com from having them available. Does your LS have a LSD rear diff? If not, it might be an opportunity to find an entire rear end with a LSD. There are some specialty wrecking yards like M&S Recycling http://www.msrecycling.com that have Montero parts. On Facebook there is a Montero Parts Exchange group.

yup - those are the part numbers. Ohh interesting - It looked like that backing plate bolted onto a flange but I didn't look very closely. Can anyone confirm it can't be separated from the entire diff?

Mine has the LSD - Do i have an option to use another differential? Is there anything that will match up and bolt in ?

I forgot about MS recycling - I'll check them out

Anyone know anything about that megazip site? Is it basically the same thing as the mitsu- parts sites where they'll take the order and then come back in a few days and say it's not available and issue a refund?
or will they just take the money and run?

or do they a legit business that will ship out what they say is available? Their web design looks super sketch to me but wondering if anyone knows the story with them?

Amayama said there was 1 left and 1 right rear backing plate available with a 64% accuracy of availability. I went ahead and pulled the trigger on ordering them - we'll see what happens.....will update if this actually works just for anyone else who finds something on amayama -

MS parts came back and said they don't have anything for gen 1's right now that can't already be found new on CARID or similar sites.

I submitted a couple of requests to that other national junkyard database - if this doesn't work i'll probably have to try to get refunds for the rear brake parts that I got and just try to find someone who will do the rear disc conversion and find a down home cousin shop to certify the inspection. Might have some rear brake parts to sell if I can't get refunds - I bought new drums, hardware, shoes, cylinders & self adjusters.
Hub parts are hard to find but the existing ones on mine look okay at first glance and they've been working fine without any issues driving the vehicle - just need bearings.

**EDIT** - UPDATE - so it's looking promising. I just got a notification that the order was accepted and they initially provided a delivery date of March 25th, then they updated the expected delivery date to April 05 - I checked the listing for the part again and it had been updated to "out of production" - then a few hours later they updated it again to show availability of "1" again for each piece - not sure what that was about - the "glass half full" in me wants to think they talked to the supplier and verified they still had a few available after my order - but the "glass half empty" in me thinks maybe it's just some automated process on their listings. Hopefully I get a notification that something actually shipped in the coming week or two - i'll keep this post updated with progress.

Another source is the Facebook group Mitsubishi Monteros USA Exchange page. 7k members, with a few who have side hustles of getting parts for people. Christopher Leon and Owen Montero come to mind. And yes the axles have to come out to get the backing plates off. Hopefully amayama hooks you up, if not, there's an option for you..

MMUSAE
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1507345922865639/