Not wanting to stir up the disc vs. drum debate all over again, but a recent thread got me to going through older threads, and that reminded me that I had a little book I'd inherited from my dad, Arco's Small Car Guide, New York, 1958. My mum had written on the flyleaf, and I translate: "To Paul — with the hope that the saturation of your car enthusiasm is hereby hastened. Agatha, 5 July 1960". Of course the saturation didn't happen. The book has short entries on some 55 smaller cars, mostly imports to the USA, though the Corvette, Rambler American, and Studebaker Lark are included. The size of American cars in 1958 had the authors considering everything the size of less expensive ordinary pre-WWII American cars and smaller to be "small cars": perhaps already entertaining the attitude, which still persists, that everything from a BMW Isetta 300 or Fiat 500 Nuova to a Mercedes-Benz 190 "Ponton" or a Rover 90 is pretty much the same size. Two of those 55 cars featured disc brakes: the Citroën DS19 and the Jaguar XK150. This tells me that the technology was already a presence, if a dim one, in the consciousness of the general car-buying American public to whom the book appears to have been oriented. It could only have been at least slightly more vivid among the contemporary car enthusiast community, contrary to what some would have us believe, that hot rodding developed in a total automotive-cultural vacuum. Manufacturers offering caliper-type disc brakes on production cars, according to Wikipedia: Crosley 1949 (troublesome and abandoned) Citroën 1955 Jensen 1956 Triumph 1956 Jaguar 1957 Studebaker 1963 Rambler 1965 Interestingly, given their subsequent reputation, Volvo only went to discs in 1965. The thing which jumped out at me, and which prompted this thread, was that the discs on the two cars covered by the book were quite large: 11½" (probably 290mm) on the Citroën and 12" on the Jaguar. Though these were solid rather than vented discs it still suggests to me that using modern big brakes might better emulate the look of a late-traditional-era mad-scientist hot rod build than smaller discs would. Citroën DS inboard front brake, less caliper: Ad for Jaguar brakes:
that jaguar uses the exact same dana 41 axle as a f100 ford pickup the shafts look like jeep ones with a bolt on hub/flange so when ford went to the 9'' in 1957 jagwar done the thing in 61 the e type gets the same f100 dana 41 centre and it goes irs which is nice. which is most groovy as you could probably run a mk2 live jagwar rear axle for wirey wheels- these are quite narrow me thinks at 56.5 - and run later v12 e type or xj6 front wire wheel hubs on a 40 spindle, as they share the asme wheel bearings as the 70 -77 mid size chevrolets that the econo disc kits use plus i bet as the discs go from solid to vented - they will be 11'', and share the gm hub layout - even offset et all............................... AND it all be pre hambtasm friendly pre 65.
I always thought the IRS was based on the Dana 44? The rear cover looks a lot like a Dana 44's? I did a whole study on the front hubs, which you might remember as you contributed quite a lot to it!
JAGUAR E-TYPE SERIES 3 V12 LH FRONT SPLINED HUB C33708 | eBay your challenge is to confirm that the v12 jagwar front wire wheel hub from the e-type is the same as the xj6 later cars the xj6/v12 series 3 e-type does infact share the same inner and outer bearings as the 70-77 chevy the rotor plane using the econo top hat spacer fits a 40 spindle you can run the metric caliper and cheap caliper carrier - you get some float.... the rims have a snap bead and dont leak out the spoke nips ahh the rotors are 284mm, which is 11''
You forgot the Mini Cooper, 1961, with front disc brakes, and the Cooper S 1963, with slightly bigger disc brakes. 7 inch diameter, Cooper, and 7.5 inch diameter, Cooper S. Oh, and an unique front wheel drive layout...
Halibrand had disc brake setups on most Indy cars starting in the mid-50s onwards. Here's an odd setup from a Petersen Publishing outtake mocking up a pair of dual-piston calipers. The name on the tire is "Faulkner". Assuming that's Walt Faulkner, who raced at Indy starting in 1950, he died during a USAC race in Vallejo, CA in 1956, which would place this image/setup prior to that. Being a 16-inch tire, and marked "RF" or "Right Front", we can assume this is for the front end of an Indy car, odd as they typically ran a single piston up front and a dual piston caliper out back. Someone was up to something strange back then!
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