New brakes leads to new enthusiasm‏

[damonhenry]

I have owned my truck for about 6 years now but have never really frequented this forum except when a google search brought me this way.  I bought the truck as a project to scratch my EV (electric vehicle) itch, so I have been more involved with other EV enthusiasts rather than the Datsun crowd.  The brakes on my truck were always a problem.  Now that I have new brakes thanks to an upgrade kit from Mike at http://www.bluehandsinc.com I'm ready to start enjoying my truck again.  The following is a post I sent off to my EV discussion list which I thought some Datsun enthusiasts might enjoy.  I highly recommend this kit for anyone that is not happy with the lousy braking that the stock 4 drum setup provides.

 

BTW - if you read the whole story you will see that Mike actually did the install for me.  After seeing the kit and how things go together once I have no doubt I could have done it myself, but Mike says that an additional $400 would probably talk him into doing the install for you as well :)

 

So I have had my pickup sitting in my driveway for the last two years unused http://evalbum.com/1524.  The brakes on it were always pretty sketchy.  Then one of the front cylinders developed a leak, and that led to air getting into the brake lines, and it was winter when working on cars is not quite as much fun, so I pulled it off the road until I could replace the failed parts.  In the meantime it did not make sense to keep paying insurance on the vehicle.  I have multiple teenage drivers in my home so even with just liability the insurance was $75 a month.  Then since I was not insuring it there was no reason to keep the registration current etc..   Once the weather got nicer, I did get the replacement parts and install them, but my first couple of shots at getting the brakes working as good as they had before the failure did not work out as well as I had planned, and the brakes were really barely ever adequate at their best.  Instead of putting the truck back on the road it went into project hibernation mode and time steadily marched on. 

Finally, last summer I got back around to the truck and started calling around and researching what it would take to upgrade my front brakes from drums to disc.  It was actually pretty tough to figure out how to get it done at a reasonable cost.  I found some people that sold some kits.  I talked to a local shop that talked to their Datsun person etc... but all the solutions I found were either more than I wanted to pay or just looked like they might be a bigger project than I was capable of doing on my own.  I did find one homebrew kit that was affordable, a little under $300 for the kit plus some parts that are easy to buy at any autoparts store, plus some that needed to be scrounged  form a junkyard.   Still it was hard for me to tell if my skill/tool set was adequate for the job.  Fortunately for me the guy who engineered and sales the kit was local, so I got in touch with him and decided to go for it.  

 

I went over to his house and saw the kit installed on his truck.  I also was able to see first hand  the installation procedure and even talked him into making a junkyard run with me so I was sure to get the right parts.  Now I was confident I could get the job done so I paid him my money and waited for the kit to get made.  He is just a hobbiest like many of us, and he had gathered several orders and was in the process of putting them together.  There were several pieces that needed to be machined, and apparently the machining gets done by another hobbiest, so summer ended and fall faded well into winter before my kit was ready to go.  Again, winter in the NW is not my favorite time to work on cars.  Even when I clear enough room in my garage to work on cars it still means leaving the garage door open as my garage is just not that large, so I tend to do most my home automotive work in my driveway.

I caught a real break though as I got back in touch with my guy, and we decided to do the install at his house so that he could get some new install video to go along with his kits.  He had me drop the truck off on a Wednesday so he could do some prep work and some videos by himself and I would come over on Saturday to finish the job up.  Well, what do you know, he decided just to go ahead and do the whole install himself as he prefers to do the videos on his own without an audience so when I showed up on Saturday all we had left was to bleed the brake lines.  So now my truck has some nice shiny disk brakes on the front and stops soooooooo much better.  I don't know if all cars had terrible brakes in 1970 or if mine were in especially bad shape, but I am so much happier with the truck now.

It is still sitting in my driveway with a car cover on it, but everything works on it again.  I've just decided that before I put it back on the road I am going to do another one of the jobs that I have always wanted to take care of which is get some of the interior restoration done.  I'm going to at least reupholster the bench seat before putting it back on the road.  I know that I need to do this before I start driving it because once it is back on the road I won't want to stop driving it long enough to pull the seat out and get the job done.

To be honest, I was not sure I would ever drive this truck again, especially with all the new OEM electric vehicle options the car makers are coming up with.  I thought I might just sell it cheap on ebay and get out of the DIY EV scene for good, but now that the brakes are sorted, I'm excited to get back to my truck.  I've taken it around the block a few times to test the brakes and it is so fun to drive my truck again...

Anyway, after I redo the seat I will probably put it back on the road with it's flooded nicads for the summer and then see if I can finally upgrade to that lithium pack I've always dreamed of before winter sets in :)