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.