Fixing The Brakes

The right front brake had been dragging after I swapped in new pads. This would have to be fixed before driving the car again so I got to work. I unbolted the caliper and took the hose off. With the parts on the table I disassembled the caliper to see what was wrong. This became apparent when pulling out the pistons. Two of them came out quite easily but two were badly stuck. I could not get them out myself but my friend welded a pipe to them and used it to twist them out.

Someone had used force to get them out before and there were large dents in the pistons. I decided to replace all four and naturally install new seals too. When the parts arrived, I also cleaned and painted the caliper.

I placed the new lip seals in the caliper bores and pushed the pistons in. I lubricated them a bit but still one of them was pretty tight. I could not find anything wrong so I pushed a bit harder. I really hope it will not be stuck again when using the brakes later... With the caliper assembled, I installed it back to the car.

I hope I'll be driving my Mustang quite a lot during summers so I also decided to upgrade the master cylinder to dual bowl model. With the original single bowl, if one of the hoses fails or one seal starts to leak, I could lose all brakes from the car. The dual bowl cylinder has separate fluid reservoirs for the front and rear so at least one should always work.

This is a really common upgrade so I could just order a new ready made pipe kit and cylinder for my car. Auto Resto Mod has also made a good video of the swap so I followed their instructions.

Installing the cylinder was simple but the pipes weren't even close. I guess they might have installed the parts in different places at the factory so I just bent the pipes until the ends were correct. Then I screwed everything in and hopefully I will have good brakes in the future. I still have to bleed them later though...