Technical front disc brakes

So your upgrade was answered earlier and by someone (very respected) who agreed. The rest of us seem to be dinking around between 1962 and 2022.

 

This ^^^^^

 

Just to clarify, disc brakes do not give increased braking force, what they give are increased control over the braking action, they are much more resistant to heat induced fade, they retain braking power when wet far better than drums, and they don't pull side to side they way drums will. Your comment of "it stops as good as the skinny tires will let it" is a good illustration of the vast misconception about braking. You will stop far better, much shorter, if you do not lock up the wheels in an emergency. This is where discs shine vs drums (especially self actuating drums). Discs will allow you to brake at the edge of lockup where drums will tend to lock up in a split second especially with skinny tires. The skinnier the tires, the better discs will allow you to remain in control in an emergency stop.

 

My question was aimed at the street rodder types that think THEY HAVE TO HAVE DISKS w/o considering anything else. My ex once made a panic stop in our old 54 Chevy when she was cut off and mentioned how it stopped as good as her late model Buick. And, every single truck in our fleet still run drums. I see the issue with rods and customs is more about folks not knowing how to match components, both drum AND disk and that leaves a bad taste in their mouths.

And, FWIW our GMC will have OT disks on the front since I am using one of @ELpolacko s Dakota crossmembers. I can see both sides.

 

I am not here to debate settled science.

One stop is not a data set.

There aren't two sides to this issue.

Commercial trucks do not equate to p***enger vehicles.

There is more contact surface in a single commercial truck shoe, than in all of the friction surfaces of a p***enger vehicle, disc or drum, probably by double.

Air brakes do not compare to hydraulic brakes.

Drums are even being phased-out on trailer trucks, in favor of discs, for the same reason as p***enger vehicles.

At one point, 8 out of 10 truck loading at our dock at GM did not have drums.

 

Especially if those drums are the "self-energizing" cut-price-excuse-for-a-servo drums so beloved of American manufacturers at one time. If you want to be able to control drums effectively, they should be as big as possible, be made of a material which conducts heat well, be amply finned and perforated, and have lots of individually-actuated leading shoes. The requisite flight of engineering artistry might be a worthwhile thing to do, but if you aren't going there, discs are the obvious choice.

 

Yeah, the self-actuating mechanisms reduce pedal effort, but they also reduce feel at the pedal, and reduce the ability of the driver to control the application of the brakes at the limit of traction.

 

I remember years ago wagner used to make a high performance drum brake shoe lining, WEB was the prefix IF I remember correctly.

For their time the wagner shoe was a definite upgrade, only problem with them it was easy to forget you still had drums until you hit that point of no return, be it speed, heat brake fade etc, then it was a moment of oh yeah these are drums ! And **** pucker sat in trying to slow down that beast.

I have been there numerous times and I kept my drum brakes in top condition using only top the of the line parts and adjusted up. Did I mention I used to like to drive hard?

.

 

My coupe had drum brakes and they made me a better driver. My 64 Caddy has drum brakes as well.

Become a better drive, keep your drum brakes.

 

Gawd forbid my last hot rod had cowl steering AND 4 wheel drums!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I must have died 100 times over!?!?!?!

 

I have looked up where a lot of where you guys live. In many cases, those places are not all that unlike where I lived when I was a kid.

My childhood hometown is within a few acres of the same size of the city that I live in now, just with, currently, 1/100th the population.

When I lived there it has two active traffic lights. When I was born it had two flashing red lights. Now it has four active lights. They finally put one in by the high school, and another by the new fire department.

Where I live now has 100x the population, in the same land area. Try to imagine your hometown, just with 100 people, for each one that you currently see.

My shop is exactly 2.99-miles away from my house.

For contrast with my hometown, there are eleven stop signs, and twenty-nine traffic lights (and one set of railroad tracks) on just one leg of that short commute.

Sure, drums might make you a better driver, but they do nothing for the 245 other drivers that I will encounter on my 3-mile commute to work. Yup, I might directly encounter close to 500 other vehicles, in close proximity to mine on my round-trip to and from work. It only takes one clown doing something stupid to render any of my vehicles a total loss. I see accidents daily.

Everything is always fine until it's not.

It is called informed consent.

If you want to generate extra, unnecessary risk for yourself, go for it. Just don't pretend that's not what you are doing, and don't try to convince others.

 

You don't have to apologize to US where you live! My 15 year old was out there for Christmas. He agreed SF is a ****hole. Loved Monterrey, Pebble and Carmel. His aunt works at the Aquarium.

 

Sounds like what areas of Texas are turning into.

 

It's not.

Can the political propaganda.

 

Actually it's more socio-economic

 

I started out with drums on my bracket race car running 12.00 flat quarter miles times, '67 GTO, 3400 lbs. Drums had less rolling resistance so the car was faster. If I made it two or three rounds into the race, I couldn't stop the thing, I had to use the very last turn off and even then it wasn't fun. During the week, I pulled the drums and sanded the shoes and drums to rough them up for the next weekend. It wasn't till I added disk that I felt like I had full control of the thing, and that was only running 114 mph on a good night.
That lesson taught me about the advantage of disk, so my '37 has them, drums were not an option.