not even close to being safe. pinion seal blows then you have an *** load of grease on the rotor..............not. put real brakes on the car.
If the driveshaft stops turning there will be no power to either wheel. I've read these posts and most of them don't make the least bit of sense. T Fever I sent an email to that buddy and he answered it. The gist of it was that he thought that the amount of fabrication necessary to make it work wouldn't be worth the results. He suggested a set of Rocky mountain brakes in the trans and possibly adding front disks. It seems that there are some kits with front disks just for speedsters. I'd do some searches for T speedster and see what I could find. There is a big speedster club in the Portland Oregon area that is pretty active and may have someone with suggestions. Here is the link to their website. http://www.nwvs.org/
What R Pope is saying is fully correct...even if it seems to make no sense... Put a car on a lift. Leave it in park or in gear so that the driveshaft CANNOT turn at all. You can still spin the wheels easily. One goes forward and one spins backward due to the differential action. Now...to put this in the real world...lets say, for example only, you have just a pinion brake and no front wheel brakes. Your pulling to the side of the road to stop behind a group of people. On the inside the wheels are on the gr*** and the other side is on dry pavement. You hit the brakes...the driveshaft stops turning...the wheel on the pavement offers excellent traction so it doesn't stop rolling...it simply causes the inside wheel on the slippery gr*** to roll backwards thru differential action...thus the movement of the car is hardly affected despite you having the brake locked solid. Open diffs rely on traction to both wheels to make them work. OUCH! Your friends are human 9 pins!!!! Don't believe it? Park something with a pinion style park brake with one wheel on a patch of ice and one on dry ground. It WON'T stay in place till both wheels have good traction. I've had an early Landcruiser with a driveline park brake for 15 years. BEEN there. Monster trucks use the extreme gearing to multiply the braking effort of a pinion brake to help them stop the huge rolling forces of the giant Terra tires. BUT...they have those huge, soft tires with a huge footprint AND high rotational forces to help prevent a tire from suddenly rolling backwards. It's NOT comparable to the effect you would see with small car tires on a light axle. One other thing...the gearing advantage which spins the pinion brake at DRIVESHAFT speed, forces a huge amount of heat to be dissipated thru the single rotor as speed is scrubbed off by friction. Ever see Monster trucks burn down a pinion brake in a 5 minute run? I wonder how much heat a car would generate on a long mountain p*** with a highly shielded little pinion brake that has hardly any real air flow available to cool it? Enough to burn maybe? They aren't a good idea as a service brake.
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