Ian.G's Track/Drift Levin.

[Ian.G]

Hey folks,

bit of progress for you on the car:

On Tuesday the car passed MOT and is now allowed back on the road again

This was a very emotional moment - I had to drive 30miles each way to the test centre and nothing fell off the car and it kept running perfectly.





As you know I've had some braking issues which we couldn't track down.

* We did everything we could to disprove a broken brake servo - this is working perfectly.
* I got a master cylinder rebuild kit - but - I'm not going to use this because I think there isn't anything wrong with what is there.
* Spoke to Gabe over at T3 where my wilwood brake kit came from - I was concerned it was the larger piston sizes in the wilwood calipers causing a larger amount of fluid and the little 13/16ths standard master cylinder not being able to cope - this used to be the case with the first wilwood kit that T3 did with 300mm disks and larger pistons - the kit I have is their second version of the kit that uses 280mm disks and calipers with piston sizes that work better with the std master cylinder setup on an ae86 - so its not that either...

Having just spoken to brother betty I think we have a hunch as to what is happening now. On a normal ae86 the outputs to the front brakes normally go into a valve after which it splits and goes to the calipers....my current setup is like this:



so there is just a banjo splitter straight from the master cylinder output and these go straight to the calipers - the standard toyota valves are not there anymore. I 'think' these valves work as a residual pressure valve which keep some pressure built up on the brake side of the brake line - and - because of this the effort required on the pedal is greatly reduced as a lot of pressure stays in the line. In the current new setup these valves are not pressure so most of the pressure can leave the brake line - then - when you push the pedal a larger/longer push is required to get the pressure back into the line so the pistons can be pushed in. Just a hunch - but it sounds technically plausible.

So - I think I either need to:

1. Try and re-plumb the brake system so it uses the standard toyota valves in the hope that this will do what I describe above.
2. Obtain some after market residual pressure valves and put them into each of the front brake lines so they have the same effect. You can see what I mean here - in fact I had to run some of these valves on my old westfield to get rid of some pedal travel in the past but I had completely forgotten about it.

At least we have some options to look at now - I'm not convinced I need to go for a bigger master cylinder.

Will let you know how that goes.



So nice to be able to drive this car after soooo long....and...its really very fast now too.