Front brakes arrive

The wilwood brake kit arrived from rally design late last week so the snow days this week gave me plenty of time to get them sorted. The kit consists of the brake disc with the option of being drilled and grooved, the caliper and all brackets and bolts needed to fit it. I also ordered ally hubs from rally design a while back and new wheel bearings from tiger. This job was one of the more easier jobs on the car. The following link has scans from the cortina haynes manual for the torque values for the bolts and the process of the rebuild.

http://gtslocost.locostsites.co.uk/downloads.htm

I had the bearing races fitted by my local garage to ensure there were in true. They also greased up the hub for me there. I had two packets of grease with the bearing kit so i thought i would use these to add more grease during the rebuild. Like a said a really staright forward job to carry out. I attached the uprights to the wishbones first and placed the hub and disc onto that rather than building the hub & upright then fitting the whole unit to the wishbones.

I have ordered new brake shoes for the rear of the car as well as new wheel cylinders. Fitting these will be the next little job. These were ordered from http://www.brakesint.co.uk/ . Next week is the trip up to tiger for a van load of parts. Other than that I have to decide on what wheels to order and sort the seats out. Heres a few photos of the brakes.

New brake disc

Wilwood 4 pot caliper

Hub with bearing in & greased

Disc bolted to the hub

On and complete

Upright ready for the hub and disc

Unit ready for the grease cap

Finished right hand side

Few jobs done

I've managed to get a few jobs done over christmas time. Firstly was to remove my adjustable bias valve for the rear brakes. I decided to add a compensator to the circuit as the bias valve would fail the IVA. The compensator was very easy to fit. The new ford ones are very small and do not need to be installed at a certain angle. This one just screws in-line making sure the arrow points to the direction of the rear brakes. You can just about make it out in the photo's below on the right hand side.

I removed the lower rear wishbones and adjusted the rose joints for the geometry to be correct. I then tightened all the nust and bolts up (not fully, this will be done when the car is on its wheels). The drum backing plates had been painted over christmas so i decided to fit them and the driveshafts. This ran into a problem I was not aware of. The backing plates do not sit flush with the Avon's rear hub carriers. A quick call to Tiger and I was informed that an angle grinder was needed to grind away the high spots on the backing plate. An hour later the backing plates were sitting flush and the drive shafts were bolted in. I used 3 x 40mm M10 and 1 x 25mm M10 for each side. The 25mm bolt is needed because one of the holes in the hub carrier is shallow.

The final little job was to bolt the handbrake handle in and cut & fit the top panel of the tunnel. I wanted this top panel to be easy to remove so decided to use M4 rivnuts. This saves drilling out rivets if it needs to be removed. Then it was a matter of marking the cut-out for the handbrake handle and cutting it out.

I am waiting for my willwood brake kit to come for the front so I can finally get that sorted. I am taking a trip up to Tiger at the end of the month for a load of parts. Mainly the bodywork, fuel tank, steering column etc. I have seen the wheels I want and also the seats. These will hopefully be ordered this month. So next job is to finish the front brakes and steering off. Heres a few photo's of it so far.

Rear end (compensator on the right)