Automotive American – Classic Vintage & Modern
Category: Juice Brakes
As you may know the car came with a very poor quality hydraulic brake conversion, to rectify this I gathered the parts to convert the system to the superior 46-48 single adjuster system. I was however missing two grease boxes for the rear. Luckily I’ve managed to track down a pair on eBay from a nice gentleman called Al for a very reasonable cost. Hopefully these will be winging across the pond shortly!
Grease boxes shown below
Now the A is at Simon’s we began by removing the front axle to facilitate the replacement of :
Those of you that have seen previous posts will know that the front king pins have been somewhat modified in a bad way to say the least! Once we got the spindles off it was even worse than we thought. The king pin bushes had been shimmed to take up excess wear in the spindles. So Simon’s Dad fabricated some custom king pin bushes from scratch as the ones in the kit just dropped through the king pin locating holes! Simon fitted the bushes and modified to allow greasing of the bushes moving forward
The two galleries give a small idea of the amount of work involved.
Whilst we were about it we decided to make things look nice by cleaning and painting as many components as possible 🙂
The weather is getting more spring like by the day which means those of us with limited workshop space can start working on our jalopies. I’ve spun the coupe around so that I can remove and clean the sump out. Also I can hopefully get the front axle removed and get the kingpins, brakes, dog bones and all the other front stuff whilst leaving the car in place. But as you can see, space is a bit tight 🙂
Good news on sorting my braking issues!
The hydraulic brake conversion done previously is a bit of a mess as you will have seen from previous posts. The backing plates had not been reworked for the Model A and are quite corroded. Via an advert in the Ford Barn I’ve managed to track down an unmolested full set of 42 -48 backing plates. These are far more preferable due to the simplified brake adjustment. The combined centre and heel adjustment of the earlier system is a real pain to adjust.
Just need them to arrive from across the pond and we can get cracking, in the meantime I’ll need to track down someone to reline my existing shoes as the rears are badly worn.
I removed the from hubs and drums today to find that I have new front brake shoes and wheel cylinders. What’s not so good is that one of the new cylinders is leaking 🙁 Whilst I was carrying out the inspection I also noticed that the right hand front shocker link was flapping around in the breeze!! So, more things for the ever increasing list…
