Thread: Brake upgrades

The earlier vehicles had a separate fluid tank (steel) that supplied both the brake and clutch master cylinders. These master cylinders obviously had two connectors, in and out! I seem to remember you have a IIA, which would mean that you probably have this system.

I believe you have an inline booster, so you do not need the booster style pedal box. In which case you need to know if you have a combined fluid tank, and whether you are going to keep it, or change to separate clutch and brake fluid tanks.

When all that is decided, then you buy a suitable 109" single circuit master cylinder (with or without a built in tank) and also a clutch master cylinder if you need one with a tank!

There are also remote mounted plastic tanks available (the ones on eBay from the UK are very expensive and can be bought cheaper!) should you wish to keep remote tanks but split clutch and brake.

i have upgraded the brakes on my 88" bitsa twice in the couple of years i've owned it (along with a few other mods, 200tdi and 3.54 diffs)...

i started off with it having 10" brakes all round powered by a non assisted single circuit

i then decided i'd like bigger drums and shoes on the front axle so i stripped the brake parts off an old salisbury REAR axle, 11" drums, backplates etc', the rear brakes as standard utilise the same slave cylinders as used on the front 10" brakes, this meant my ratios (master to slave) were going to be correct

this improved my holding ability on steep slopes but being non servo meant i still had to apply a fair bit of leg pressure

eventually the master cylinder decided to give up the ghost and leak fluid into my footwellso i decided to go for my next upgrade

i had a Series3 (that had been on 10" brakes) dual line assisted pedal box complete sat on the shelf (it had been there for about 18 months) so swapped it in (not forgetting to connect the vacuum pump up)

i didn't bother with the shuttle valve unit, i just made up new pipes, the first (front one) went straight to the flexi pipe that drops to the rear axle, the second (rear of master cylinder) went straight to the Tee piece that feeds the front axle

i bled them off, adjusted the shoes (twin adjusters now on the front axle) and tested it

what a difference, i had good to excellent brakes before but now the only limit to the stopping power is the traction between the tyres and the tarmac (just be aware that excessive traction can make it really twitchy under heavy emergency braking, i've had mine trying to swap ends at speed even in a straight line due to the rear going "very" light) and all this is without giving my leg muscles a workout anymore

plus there's not the difficulty of bleeding two slaves per side on the front axle doing this modification

just thought i'd throw my twopennorth in