• Hi Guest!
    You can help ensure that British Car Forum (BCF) continues to provide a great place to engage in the British car hobby! If you find BCF a beneficial community, please consider supporting our efforts with a subscription.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

TR6 Need wisdom on tr6 brake calipers

Share this page

S

Scot Montrey

Freshman Member
Country flag
Offline
Hello all - My 74 Tr6 sat for a long time before I recently fired her up again and went for a ride (long story there). Thought I'd gotten lucky that the front brake calipers still worked ok, though the steering sort of pulled to the left. Sigh... It's a testament to how much fun I was having that I didn't put the two together until I stopped at a light and realized SMOKE was coming out through the spokes of my left front wheel, and not just a little. Gads, but that caliper must have gotten good and hot.

Anyway though I normally don't like to risk problems with reproduction parts if I don't have to, I'm thinking probably better to go ahead and get new calipers after that punishment. I'd be interested in recommendations -- I don't race or anything like that so I don't need an expensive "upgrade", but neither am I determined to pay the rock bottom lowest price ... not on brakes! I'll pay for quality.

Second question is: how I'm supposed to make sure I get the right ones? All of the commission nos. that the catalogs list are CCxxxxx, and mine says CF14044U. I think my car was built right around the time they switched to metric threads, too. Any help here would be Most Appreciated.

PS. When I resuscitated the car I switched to DOT 5, which is new stuff for me and I see a topic of lively debate here and elsewhere. Anything I should do after having surely boiled it besides just a bit of extra bleeding?

Thanks as always, Scot M.
 
Scott, first thing I'd do is check the flexible hoses. If they're old, they might be breaking down internally and causing the problem you have. Frankly, I'd just change them if you don't know how old they are. After that, overhauling calipers is not difficult. Or get some rebuilt/exchange calipers from Ted Schumacher (price is right, IMO): http://tsimportedautomotive.com/tr250tr6parts.html#brakes
 
I agree that you would be best off to rebuild what you have. The replacement parts are the pistons and rubber parts. I can not recommend any particular place and there are several, as I rebuild my own.
 
Rebuilding best way to go an easy to do as stated above. DOT 5 is higher temp I would not mix more work and time but it is your brakes. Same with rubber lines. The end result is you know your brake system is all new and less than cost of new calipers. You may have damaged rotor warped and also over heated wheel bearing still not that big a job. At least repack bearings and new seals. Your car has two sides do it complete. You tell us it is a 1974 how much is org. to you and car. I have two cars one SUV new and my 1973 TR 6 either one gets driven any day top down. I call my TR a road trip car and trips 1,000 miles is normal. I live in Northern Nevada and a trip to Reno is a 100 mile round trip to club meetings and 300 miles around Lake Tahoe. The standard stock brake pads work fine. NOTE keeping DOT brake fluid is best because it is alcohol base and as a last resort you can add water to get home. Madflyer
 
FWIW - Rebuilding the calipers is easy. Even splitting them is easy. Moss sells the square-section o-rings the lack of which was the reason for years Girling said OMG whatever you do, don't split the calipers. The large o-ring in the bore does the whole sealing job, so as long as everything's clean, it doesn't matter if there are some small pits in the bores. I'd install new pistons if your old ones weren't immaculate.

Before I painted my Healey's engine compartment, I cleaned out all the lines with brake cleaner and compressed air, replaced all the rubber in the masters and slaves, and installed SS hoses. Then I installed DOT5 silicone fluid. Harder to bleed but doesn't mess up the paint.

Redoing the whole system like that was pretty inexpensive because I did all the work myself and the parts are cheap.
 
I don't know if would say rebuilding the calipers is easy, getting both the inner seal and the dust seal fitted can be more than a little fiddly, but would agree a rebuild would be the way to go, the seal seals against the piston, which is replaceable, and as mentioned should be replaced if marred or corroded.
 
I have done six sets now and agree that it is a bit tricky. I have not had to split the halves on any of these. But I have replaced the pistons as well as the seals and dust covers. If one is not into trying to do this there are several places to rebuild them.
 
Back
Top