Manual Brake conversion Y/N?

How much weight will you be saving without a booster? 8lbs or so? Not worth it on a street car....

try searching. last week or so, Hllon had a thread going with some good info from Rick and others (as i recall).
i am not real sure what Hllon did, but he was re-engineering his brake pedal so he had more leverage. sounds like the pedal effort was killin him. they were talking about componentry used, etc.
i am not into racing or weight savings, but i am inclined to agree with Black Fox. the brake thing sounds like a pain for minimal gain. it would be better to go on a diet and lose 8 pounds. LOL.
in any case, good luck.

The stock brake system was designed with the brake booster in mind. Try unplugging the vaccume line (and capping it off) from the booster and drive it, the pedal is hard as a rock because of the ratio in the pedal. Like with power steering. Of course older cars didn't have power brakes, but I have driven them before and you have more movement in the pedal. The brake pedal is going to be stiffer no matter what. I think you might have better brake controll because you would have more controll, assuming your leg is strong.

Put it this way, you drive around with manual brakes and steering, I feel sorry for the dumbarse that decides to get out of his car and road rage on you, you'll get strong.

I have come to help you out. My pedal was so hard (how hard was it) that I couldnt push the pedal enough to stop the car.

IMO, if you have room for the booster and vacuum to work it, then keep it.

If you do decide to do this, you are going to have to modify your brake pedal no matter what M/C you use. You can keep the factory M/C if you want. I use a chrysler MC with a 15/16 bore. If the master cylinder has a smaller bore than the slave cylinder (caliper piston), it gives a mechanical advantage. The smaller the bore of the m/c, the harder you can get the slave cylinder to push with the same effort on the MC. The thing to watch out with this is that you may not have enough volume to push the brakes far enough to hit the pads and or drums if you go too small on the mc bore or have big bore calipers (or combination of both).

The trick for the pedal is you MUST move the pin that connects to the M/C rod up higher on the pedal to give more leverage. I moved mine an inch up and it made a big difference. I would like to have gone up about 1.5-2 inches, but I would have had a hard time keeping everything in line. You want the rod to push as straight into the m/C as possible. Dont want angles.

I bought the ASP booster eliminator kit for about $70. I think that this kit is ok,but I think it could be better. There is room to move the master cylinder higher on the firewall. This would allow for your brake pedal pin to be moved even higher on the pedal to get less effort.

Ideal pedal ratio on manual brakes is 6:1. I think the stock pedal is about 3.75 :1 or so.

Baer or some big brake company sells a modified pedal and the eliminator kit for 200. I should have bought that.

Also skinny kid makes the kit that rick91gt uses. Jegs and summit both sell kits.

Oh by the way, there is one thing that you give up for less pedal effort, that is pedal travel. You will have less force to push, but the pedal will move farther overall.

Muscle Mustangs and Fast Fords has a tech write-up in the sept 03 issue called rearend remake part 2.

Good info there.

PM or email with q's. I have a lot of good things on what not to do!

Hllon, thanks for chiming in i remembered some of what you and Rick were talking about, but did not want to try to regurgitate it on this thread (fearing i would get the info wrong). the gist was that it is kind of a pain to do. thanks for the edumacashion.

Very Easy to convert, just need to do a few things if you do not buy one off the full kits.

I ran the ASP bracket and stock master and at 130mph I was pushing it through the floor I was standing on it so damn hard. The larger master and brake pedal re-engineering really helps..

Rick 91GT said:

Very Easy to convert, just need to do a few things if you do not buy one off the full kits.

I ran the ASP bracket and stock master and at 130mph I was pushing it through the floor I was standing on it so damn hard. The larger master and brake pedal re-engineering really helps..

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Now there is a lot of good info available. When I was fighting a hard pedal, I looked here and on hard core 5.0. Was hard for anyone to give any info. I looked at some of the old posts from you and I gather you had the same issues about finding good info.

i would say its definatly not worth it. especially not on a daily driven car. just make it a bunch more work to drive. I would keep with the power brakes, some things are worth the weight.

im the last one to know any of this, but if you are missing vac (nice cam, eh), could you not run a vacuum canister? i dont know what they weigh, but it cant be much, relatively speaking.
just a dumb idea. good luck.