Tag: backplates

BRAKES, Ultimate Guide To Fitting ’39-’48 Hydraulic Brakes To Your ‘A’…. Enbloc @HAMB

BRAKES, Ultimate Guide To Fitting ’39-’48 Hydraulic Brakes To Your ‘A’…. Enbloc @HAMB

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This subject seems to come up alot on the HAMB, “How do I fit hydraulics to my Model ‘A’ “. Hopefully this should show how to fit said brakes the CORRECT way.

My Model ‘A’ came already fitted with hydraulic brakes, but the more I studied them the more things I noticed were wrong with the way they were fitted. The true horrors weren’t discovered until they were actually removed from the car.

I decided the best way forward was to start again with a fresh set of backing plates.

ere is your basic ’39-’48 Ford backing plate. In this case they are the later ’46-’48 plate as they have the riveted rather than bolted bottom pivots. You will also need the correct hubs and drums as the original ‘A’ ones will not work with the hydraulic backing plates.

We’ll start with the fitting of the front brakes first.
This is the stripped hub. You’ll need a front fitting kit which consists of 2 bearing spacers and two backing plate spacer rings. You can see how these are mounted to the hub.
Take care with the backing plate spacers as they are cast iron piston rings and will break easily if forced.

Another good juice brakes article

Building The Front Brakes

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Nice evening so I thought I’d test build the front brakes before fitting in July. No wheel cylinders as I’m hoping to use the relatively new ones that are on the existing back plates. It was a useful exercise and gave me some assurance that I’ve got all the bits to fit them in anger. The shoes are the nice Bob Drake type from Miles at Jack hammer. One downside was that when I took the shoes out of the box there was a dent in a couple of the shoes. Not the end of the world, but a little miffed all the same. Now waiting for Miles to get his next order from Bob Drake so I can build up the rears at least a little.  Won’t be able to do too much as I need to reuse the existing handbrake levers.  

 

 

Update on Brakes !!

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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.

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