October 31, 2010 - The brakes are done!
There's one long line that runs from the proportioning valve, over the brake pedal box, through a new grommet in the body, down to the bottom of the footwell, along the outside sill, through another grommet and finally to a hard line anchor like this one by the rear axle. Whew!
Once it gets to the rear axles, there's a tee and the line splits to the left and right rear brakes. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out a way to run a hard line straight to the calipers. They use a banjo fitting, and the only banjo-to-flare adapters I could find were AN fittings.
This drives me nuts every time I work on brake systems. Modern cars use metric brake fittings. My local auto parts stores only have SAE fittings. And the performance aftermarket only uses AN. It's ridiculous. No matter how much I try, I simply can't use a consistent type of fitting through the whole car.
To make things more fun, SAE and metric fittings use a 45 degree flare. AN fittings use a 30-something degree one. They're not compatible, and you need a separate flaring tool to make the AN flares. So in order to adapt my hard lines to that AN-to-banjo piece, I'd have to buy another flaring tool. I don't know why the racing industry worships at the altar of AN fittings, they're only nice to have if you don't have any production items in the whole car. Otherwise you end up mixing and matching.
So, in order to deal with this banjo fitting on the calipers, I decided to use off-the-shelf Miata flex lines. A flex line is not needed here because there's no relative movement between the axle and the caliper, but they'll do the job and are easily replaced if the need arises. For the connection between the hard line and the various flex lines, I used some brackets off a wrecked Miata. It's interesting to note that this particular design of anchor is the same as used on the MG in the first place. Well, it works!
So, the plumbing is all done. I'll have to bleed them at some point in the future, and then I'll undoubtedly find some problems...
tags: brakes |
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