Rear Disc Brakes Continued

It took a while to find some of the correctly fitting parts but some more progress has been made.

New rotors.

Powder coated the calipers and the rest of the misc parts.

Assembled.

One problem I noted. For some odd reason the Panther backing plates have a longer pad guide plate than the Explorer backing plate. So I had to procure the Explorer hardware kit for those. Live and learn.....

Why Ford would make two different backing plates with such an small odd difference I'll never know.

This looks better.

A small note, I wasn't trying to be some pretentious wanker in buying "Brembo" pads. It's just Rock Auto had a clearance on them, I think they were 12 bucks, it was a good deal.

OK, now to tackle hydraulic caliper hoses.

I had poured through Rock Auto's hydraulic hoses for different makes, years and models and bought some OEM hoses that I thought had a chance of working.

Well they didn't.

As much as I try to not turn my cars into rolling Summit advertisements I had to turn to the aftermarket for these .

I wanted DOT certified hoses and Summit said these were DOT street legal hoses and I paid approximately twice the price for that. But we'll get into that in the next post.

These Russel hoses are supposed to be DOT legal. Well they are not and I'm a little miffed about paying for something that isn't.

Simply putting the letters DOT, does not meet the legal requirements.

Even says street legal on the box.

It took me less than 2 minutes to find the statute online and I'm sure a 9 year old can clearly follow it.

This is referencing FMVSS No. 106.

It's not that I'm trying to be difficult, it's just that if you're product says it's something and really isn't, that's not fair to the consumer.

You can clearly see that you need to have the registered name, the letters DOT, printed lines but most importantly the date of manufacture, the inside diameter of the hose, and whether or not it's low expansion or regular expansion material. The date is the most important because hoses age and you need to know at a glance if the hose is simply too old to use. There is an SAE spec that states rubber hoses have a useful life of 10 years from the date of manufacture.

I am assuming this is the date of manufacture inside the box, fat lot of good it does on the box and not the hose.

These are the hoses I bought for the '68 model year aftermarket. You can see they are compliant.

All I can say is Russel get your act together, there's no excuse for this! This is typical bone idled laziness on the companies part.

Another reason I am concerned about this is if they can't get a simple printing detail right what about the quality of the rest of the hose. After the body is joined to the chassis for good, I plan on testing these brakes, even if the engine isn't ready to run yet I can attach the vacuum pump to the booster and mash the brake pedal to the floor. If these hoses pop or leak then it's plan B.

Plan B would be buying the simple steel adapter from 10 mm banjo to AN-3 and simply making my own brake hoses from Aeroquip 303-3 hose and 491-3 fittings (done this before). These are certified aircraft parts. Yes they won't be DOT approved, but they are approved for certified aircraft. In my book if they are legal on Boeing, Airbus and even a crappy Cessna then they are more than good enough for an automobile.

The reason why I am railing on this is the personal responsibility we have when we modify or even do maintenance to a car. Taking short cuts can have really bad consequences and we are liable for what we do to our cars if they should injure and or cause property damage to others. It's important to be diligent in our work. Ignorance is no excuse.

OK rant over moving on...

Next up is the adapter I'll need to go from 3-AN to 3/8-24 inverted flare. I found a couple of these and bought them. They have different clip heights for different thicknesses of bracket they'll be mounted in. I plan on using some left over 4130 steel from previous projects and it's 1/8" thick. The bottom fitting may work the best.

The plan is to route the brake hose like so.

I can make the bracket to thread into the lower control arm welded bracket on the axle housing and it can hold the adapter fitting right about here. Once that is made I can make the stainless brake lines and complete the plumbing on the rear axle.

More to come.

Cheers