Ok so its come time to upgrade the brakes, as with the new motor the brakes are cooking pretty quick.

I have std 1303 brakes, which look like the "girling"caliper. can anybody spread any light on background, as most pads etc seem to be made for the single or twin. Which caliper is the best (in the future i would like to do a caliper upgrade) but at the moment, just want my std brakes to work better.

Any tips on sources for pads or other tricks for getting the most out of the brakes. I normally use the car for autocross and hillclimb. so maybe up to 3 or4km max, with an average of 2km length of course.

I've never cooked the standard brake setup in 14years of racing, this includes hillclimb as well as multilap supersprints !

Do you have type 3 rear drums ?

Hi

Early Type 3 callipers bolt on and have larger pistons and slightly larger swept area. They are twin pin like 72 only super bugs but only have 1 bleed nipple.

Steve

Its a std setup front and rear. I will go over them this weekend and see if i can find why i lost the peddle over the course of the event. I adjsuted up the rear std drums before the event, and normally they don't go out that fast.

I think a change in caliper on the front so that i can run tht twin caliper ones and get better pads for them may be the go. Also hopefully source some fiat rears....

Hi Bix,

I'm happy with my T1 disks and T3 drums.

But I found the standard pads in the Varga calipers would fade giving a spongy peddle. Changing to Bendix fixed that. There are more fancy pads on the market too.

The T3 rear drums went out of round and used to make the peddle pulse. The shoes were worn unevenly. So I sent them to St Marys brake and clutch. They added some linings to match the material the drums are made from and machined everything up. Now the work fine.

Every year or so I pull new brake fluid through the whole system. Before each supersprint I bleed the brakes, once again pulling a fair bit of fluid through to get rid of any old stuff. I also keep the shoes adjusted. I belt the drums with a rubber mallet to centre the shoes as I adjust them. I adjust them until they drag and then back a stop. I don't know if that's the text book way of doing it but it works for me.

My car is only 760 kilos and I don't brake so hard that I lock wheels. So if your car is much heavier or if you're harder on the brakes you may need something beefier.

I'm glad your new engine is working out.

How does it feel?

Regards CT

yeah an upgrade of pad is the first step, AFTER you have checked that everything is 'factory specs'

If you're still running out of brakes, I am manufacturing these vented brakes to suit ball-joint VW in a variety of stud patterns (VW, Porsche, Jap 4 & 5 stud etc)

Also have a rear disc kit

As you can see the caliper and brake pad are a bit larger than stock!

got any prices for the discs

Thanks for you tips guys, as most ppl seem to find the std ish setup fine i will jsut take some steps. I do find though with the semi's i can't get near lock up with the std brakes. I think i might try to following,

-adjsut rears again
-give the system a full bleed (and bleed the calipers before each event to get rid of any cooked fluid)
-upgrade to twin pin fronts (or type 3) and then i can actually source a wide range of pads (not just the stockers)
-get some type 3 drums on the back
- See VWcool about a whole new setup.

Hi Ct the new engine is very very sweet. It was such a blast out on the autocross circuit. It would spin up in 3rd out of some of the corners. I just need a LSD and it will be a very very quick little club car. And with the 48 ida's and the fatboy, it sounds awesome (Though that really doesn't help with speed....). It does run a little hot, but then it was 35 degrees, little wind ona track notorius for overheating cars (eg lots of full throttle, but not much in terms or long hi speed to get the airflow). so might be looking at adding a fan to the extenral cooler, or maybe a second cooler if required. It got up to about 107 degrees, but then it does run near 11:1 CR.....

Hi

A friend of mine used to do pretty well in hill climbs etc with a 2180cc powered L bug. This car was doing 13 sec 1/4s in the early 80s.

The photo below is from an old track in western Sydney called Silverdale. There was famous corner there called big tree. After watching my friend exit this corner in his bug and get virtually no wheel spin, I asked him if he was running a LSD.

No LSD, he always found the worst corner at any track for wheel spin and backed off his handbrake accordingly, so as he exited the corner he would apply slight handbrake pressure to prevent the inner wheel from spinning.

Steve

PS, this is my car now, the one I'm fitting an STI etc to