Give Me A Brake

For the past four months, ever since I bought my car, I've been slowly deciphering what all the aftermarket parts are on my car. One of the biggest mysteries is the disc brakes. Obviously, 4-wheel disc brakes were not available on many cars in 1966, definitely not on the Mustang. A quick search on Google shows there aren't that many options available, especially for the rear, so it shouldn't be that hard to match something with what I have.

Here's a shot of the rear caliper taken from under the car. As you can see there aren't any markings at all.

This shows how the caliper is attached to the axle flange with some adapters. You would think that all I had to do was find a matching rear disc upgrade kit and I would be able to ID mine. The closest I could find is made by SSBC.

The caliper looks to be the same shape but the SSBC kit has some lettering on the caliper where mine are plain. One of my rear calipers is leaking so I need a caliper rebuild kit right away. Amazingly, SSBC doesn't seem to sell one. I guess they just want you to by another caliper.

Here's a picture of the same kit from Amazon. It's interesting how some of the hardware is different. I guess since mine is around 10 years old they changed things a bit. I'm still not sure if the calipers are interchangeable, and I don't know what to do about rebuilding my caliper.

Here's a picture of my contaminated brake pads. Now these do look exactly like the SSBC pads.

Here's a closeup of the leaking piston. I debated whether I could pull the piston out to measure the seal and order one based on the size but I didn't know if that would work. So I just cleaned everything up and put it back together until I could find the right seals.

After several months of not getting anywhere I happened to be browsing through the National Parts Depot catalog and was shocked when I read the description for one of their SSBC brake kits.

"These kits use calipers, rotors & pads from the SVO Mustang or Thunderbird Turbo Coupe."

WTH? Why didn't I find this out sooner. Unbelievably, this tidbit of information isn't listed on the NPD website, only in their paper catalog. And it certainly isn't revealed anywhere on the SSBC website. I quickly did a search and found that the '93 Cobra reused the rear brakes from the older T-bird Turbo Coupe.

Here's a picture of a '93 Cobra rear caliper. The caliper sliding pins are the same as mine and more important so is the parking brake mechanism.

Here's another shot of my caliper.

And here's a picture of my caliper mounting bracket. It looks like I finally hit the jackpot and I'll be ordering a rebuild kit along with some new pads right away.

Update: With new pads and a caliper rebuild kit in hand I went to work. The caliper came of easy but I had a hard time plugging the brake line. I ended up using two vacuum plugs, one on each side of the banjo fitting, but not without a lot of fluid and cuss words leaking all over the place.

Above is a picture of the new and old seals next to the piston. Notice how the new seal on the bottom left has a much smaller inside diameter than the old one. I was really worried it was the wrong size but I guess the old one stretched out after 10 years. The two smaller seals are for the parking brake, which I wasn't planning on touching as Ford doesn't recommend servicing it. If you look close at the side of the piston you can see a gouge/scratch that didn't look good.

I'm not sure if this was the cause of my leak, but I spent a couple of hours trying to buff it out. It ended up being much deeper than it looks and I ended up polishing through the finish layer of the piston. A remanufactured factory caliper is only around $60 so I didn't want to waste any more money or effort on this one so I decided to put it all back together and see how it held up.

Here's the piston ready to go back with the seals in place. You can see the parking brake mechanism poking out of the caliper--you have to rotate the piston as it goes into the caliper. You can also see that the caliper has a groove around the piston cylinder, but the outside seal is lacking any kind of lip to hold it in place.

This ancient pair of pliers worked perfect for screwing in the piston. They do make a fancy tool that does the same thing, but since my caliper didn't have any fluid in it the piston slid right in. If there is fluid in the caliper than you have to force the fluid all the way back to the master cylinder, thus the need for the fancy tool.

Here's what the seal looks like when it's fully seated. While it seems to be snug there's only friction keeping it in place when the piston extends to the left. As I said before, if this leaks I'll probably pick up some factory 1993 Cobra calipers. They aren't as clean looking casting-wise, but they are cheap.

Cleaner Air

My car came with a huge 6" tall air filter that is definitely the biggest I've ever seen under a hood.

Besides trying to compensate for something it hid my new Holley carb. I looked at getting a shorter filter and then adding a spacer on top of the carb. However, most of the spacers were either plastic and tended to melt or were chunks of aluminum that tended to interfere with the choke linkage. I found somebody on eBay selling a velocity stack air cleaner base that was made of spun aluminum and would raise my filter up about 1.5". That should give me the clearance I want to make my carb more visible. I also picked up a 4" tall reusable filter make by Spectre.

The new filter is half the price of a K&N and also less than half as rigid. It was a little difficult getting it to look circular--one side wanted to push in.

Here's a low shot of the velocity stack base--very nice quality.

Here's a side shot showing how visible the carb is now.

In The Hood

My fiberglass hood is a teardrop Thunderbolt copy manufactured by Crites Restoration Products. Being fiberglass it probably weighs less than half what the stock hood weighs. Whoever installed the hood removed all of the hood latch hardware and installed hood pins to hold it down. While it'd be nice to still have the factory latch the it's still recommended to add the hood pins to keep the lightweight hood from flexing at speed.

Here you can see my old hardware along with the replacement pieces. The old plates were very scratched up while the clips were rusty and very hard to get on and off. I didn't really like the old hairpin clips since you had to twist them while pulling, which made it all too easy to scratch the paint when the clip suddenly released. The new hood pin kit, Allstar Performance ALL18500 Silver 1/2" Aluminum Hood Pin Kit, cost lest than $15 from Amazon. I needed a 4" pin and these were just barely long enough. The included plates were just plain aluminum discs and they didn't even come with screws. I didn't like the way the screws look plus they snag when waxing the car so I looked for an alternative. ICT Billet makes these cool plates, Billet Aluminum Hood Pin Plate Kit Replacement Plates 551444, that come with countersunk hex-head screws for only $11. I was a little worried that the finish would look too dull but 5 minutes with some Semichrome polish made a huge improvement.

While it's not exactly a mirror polished finish you can still see the reflection of the pin. My fiberglass hood, much like the factory steel hood, is made from two pieces sandwiched together. Where the pins go through the hood is around 1.5" thick. The hole where the pin goes through the underside of the hood is oversized for clearance and is about 1". I was hoping I would be able to reach through the hole with my finger to thread the nuts on the backside of the machine screws.

Whoever installed the old plates didn't align them very well. One was parallel with the side edge of the hood while the other was parallel with the front edge. Either alignment is fine as long as they were the same, instead they were about 10 degrees different. Since the new machine screws needed a bigger hole than the old sheet metal screws this gave me the opportunity to fix the alignment without drilling a new set of holes. I took my time lining up the plates and using a small drill bit I "dragged" the hole to the center. Then, when I used the larger bit it went where I wanted instead of where the old screw used to be.

The new billet plates were flat while the hood has a slight bend. The front and rear edge of the plate ended up being about 0.5mm above the hood. No good. I grabbed two pieces of scrap wood and placed them on the floor about 2" apart and placed the plate across the gap. I then laid a long socket extension on top of the plate to spread the load and gave it a few taps with a 5 lb. hammer. You could barely tell the plate was bent and when placed on the hood it sat flush all around. I balanced the nuts on my fingertip and reached up through the hole to line them up the screw holes. I didn't lose a single one inside the hood.

Tada! The torsion clips are so much easier to get on and off. For now I reused my old lanyards but they're a little discolored from age. Someday I might remove the plates and try to polish them some more but for now it looks pretty nice.

UPDATE: August 2017

Crites recommends that you don't use the factory hood springs since they put too much stress on the hood. My springs appear to be smaller, weaker springs that are designed for lighter hoods. However, with the springs in place you can see that the hood doesn't sit as flush on the sides as it does without any springs. So I've gotten into the habit of removing the springs when the car sits in the garage. This was a little inconvenient and I was worried about leaving the springs behind when I went to a show or cruise-in so I needed a new solution.

I picked up some 5/16" chain from the local hardware store and attached it to the back of the hinge with a quick link. When I want to lower the hood I hook onto the end link.