Braking System
Like everything else on this car the brakes are going to be a little different. The car was originally fitted with drum brakes all round with a dash mounted handbrake operating on the front wheels. My plan is to fit the later disc brakes at the front which will involve moving the handbrake to the rear wheels, but I can't use the floor mounted handbrake fitted to most later cars as I want to have a bench front seat.
Also I find the pedal effort a little high on the disc brake cars and want to fit a brake servo.
The handbrake came from a Spanish built 1983 TL. The Spanish built cars combined an odd mix of components from various years of production, and one of their crazy ideas was to operate a handbrake mechanism on the rear wheels via a dash mounted lever. That's lucky! It's a terrible photo. I've modified the handbrake to make it ergonomic to operate from the right hand side of the car, but have mounted it on the left side because I'm out of space on the right side. The old mounting brackets have been removed, the handbrake rotated by 90 degrees, and new brackets made. The one to the right side of the photo was easy, but it took me a day to get the angles for the mounting to the bulkhead. |
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I did an experiment with my GTL. Wound it up to speed then did an emergency stop. The wheels didn't lock up. All the brakes are fairly new on my GTL so they ought to be reasonably efficient. Possibly the move from asbestos brake pads in the 1990s has increased the pedal pressure required to lock the brakes. I'm planning to fit at least 155 section tyres on this car, so a system that doesn't lock 135 tyres isn't going to fit the bill. I needed a servo. This is a remote servo made by Lockheed (Delphi own the name these days). I decided on a 2:1 boost ratio after a lot of deliberation. I've got a 1.65:1 on the MGA and it works well, but the pedals are in a slightly more fiddly position on the Renault so it's not so easy to push hard on the pedal. I'll feedback whether it's a good choice when I have the car on the road. |
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I couldn't decide which master cylinder to use. The early style seems to be available with 20.2mm or 22mm bore (depending on year and whether the car is a van or not). It had to be a single circuit master cylinder as the remote circuit is single circuit. That meant an early type master cylinder. But people have reported excessive pedal travel problems on the early cars. I guess a lot of that would be due to the manual brake adjusters that my car won't have, but the problem would be exaggerated with a servo. In the end I took pot luck. I bought on eBay. The cylinder was described in the advert as for a car or van. But the pacakage was marked van. I think I've got the 22mm bore. There's some earlier forum discussion about brakes, boosters and bore sizes. |
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Still to come
Lots more to come on this page. The brake fluid reservoir is very tricky to get at with the radiator expansion bottle and battery in place. That'll probably become a remote reservoir soon.
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