Wilwood brakes

[Her69fastback 3]

I’m going to replace the brakes on the 69. The  car has manual brakes. This is my wife’s car. She doesn’t like driving it because of the brakes. I have talked to wilwood they said go with 7/8 bore master cylinder. Or should I just do power brake booster? Does anyone’s wife drive a car with a 7/8 bore master cylinder and think it stops great or would rather have power brakes?

[TexasEd 188]

Are they already disc brakes or are they still drums?

I don't want to assume you already converted to disc because there will be a big jump in performance from manual drum to manual disc.

Getting a booster installed is pretty difficult on a V8 even a 302 if the engine is still installed.  You have clearance issues, new hard lines and a new brake pedal to install.  None of those problems switching to manual discs.

So if you don't already have them try the manual discs as an incremental step.  Nothing you do will be wasted if you want to add a booster later.

 

 

[det0326 179]

The only thing I could add is if your car's engine is pretty much stock making lot of vacuum, power assist will work fine. If not tho and making low vacuum  in my opinion u would be better off with manual discs. This is me been there done that thing

[rwcstang 201]

2 hours ago, det0326 said:

The only thing I could add is if your car's engine is pretty much stock making lot of vacuum, power assist will work fine. If not tho and making low vacuum  in my opinion u would be better off with manual discs. This is me been there done that thing

Agreed with Det0326, try the manual brakes and go for the 6 piston wilwood offers. a friend has it on his 69 vert/manual brake setup and stops really well.

[Rsanter 152]

Honestly, if this is the wife’s car, first thing is I would add the power brakes.

adding the booster and swapping the pedal is easy to do even with the engine in the car. Odds are she is used to a car with power brakes (as most people today are) so that I think is the direction.

you will need the proper PB petal but for the booster I like to use the booster from Tuff stuff. I got mine from summit racing and it was less than a rebuilt original. The Tuff stuff booster is a non-concourse version of the booster used on the boss 429 so it give a feel just like the original but also leaves a bit more room in that are which makes it easier to work on.

originally I went with it because I was going with the willwood MC and it was too long to fit in that space. I am super happy with the setup I currently have

 

going to disc brakes:

you can add the willwood disc brake kit to the front and add an adjustable prop valve and all this is easy bolt on stuff if you are not concerned about absolute originality. You also have the option to go, with the factory disc brake setup if you wanted it to be more factory appearing

[gsxrken 21]

On 11/28/2022 at 5:42 PM, det0326 said:

The only thing I could add is if your car's engine is pretty much stock making lot of vacuum, power assist will work fine. If not tho and making low vacuum  in my opinion u would be better off with manual discs. This is me been there done that thing

Just make sure the total piston area of the 6 piston is larger than their 4 piston setups. More area,  or necessarily more pistons, will make for more  braking force at the same pedal effort. 
And get good pads with a high friction coefficient that bite hard at COLD temps.