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MG MGB Technical - caliper advice

Hi,I am a bit new at english cars, restored an 80 MGB for the wife now I am on my own hot rod version, has anyone had luck with retrofitting front brake calipers and vented rotors from another car? I would like to avoid digging around for old rover parts and cant afford wilwood, I saw on a tr6 site, where a gent had adapted toyota calipers to his.

Thanks in advance for any help
Jim
jim

You can get rebuilt loaded calipers through any parts house for about $75 each, and standard rotors are cheap. I'm sure someone will chime in with options, but you can stop your car very well with original parts at a very reasonable price.
...

Agreed. Stock MGB brakes are more than adequate for the vehicle's weight. Even most of the race cars I've seen have stock brakes, but with harder pads.
Steve Simmons

The brakes were uprated on the V8, their pads are slightly larger, and this might be a sensible upgrade.
M Barnfather

Volvo brakes
You need to redrill the bolt holes as they are about 5mm further apart. The caliper has two hose connections. You need to either cross drill the caliper and block off one hose inlet, or plumb both outlets into one externally.
This is what I'm using, i bought them as an upgrade kit off MG Workshops in Melbourne. You can buy a set of stainless braided conversion hoses off them for around $150 australian
You can use peugot turbo disks. These are the right size and depth, but you need to redrill the holes.
This was for a V8 conversion. The engineer required it. Otherwise I would not have bothered, standard brakes with uprated oversize pads and braided hoses are mre than good enough.
Peter

You can get drilled and slotted brakes for MGBs, not wildly expensive. For my car the standard non servo set up with braided hoses and green stuff pads is more than adequte, and very nice to use.
Stan Best

Jim, for most V8 conversions unless really driven to extreme limits the stock brakes should be fine, possibly uprating the pads to MGV8 units. Check the MG V8 Newsletter http://www.britishv8.org/index.htm and see what a lot of the conversions are running. You might also check with Bill Guzman at http://www.classicconversionseng.com/
He has a brake upgrade kit for the MGB that's fairly reasonably priced, might be in your budget. He can also tell you if you really need an upgrade for the type of driving you plan on doing.
As for the other upgrades, we did get the Volvo's so those calipers are around, but the Peugot Turbo never made it to this country, so those discs would have to be imported.
Bill Young

Unless you upgrade the tyre to road contact uprating the front brakes can be counter-productive. If with the upgraded fronts you can lock them with lower pedal pressure, then you will be getting less braking effect from the rear and hence less overall. The only possible advantage is for competition use where frequent heavy braking causes fading or fluid boiling with the standard setup.
Paul Hunt 2

This thread was discussed between 19/04/2007 and 20/04/2007

MG MGB Technical index

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