soft brake woes
 

While I was in Iraq, my friend installed a brand new 4-wheel disc brake conversion kit for me on my 67 camaro. I'm not sure if he bench bled the mc but maybe someone can tell me if that could be my issue.

The brakes work but i have to stand on the pedal to stop the car. So far i've only driven it up and down my street and once to the gas station. The trip to the gas station was the worst. I had soft braking, but enough to stop the car where i wanted it to. I turned the car off, fueled it, started it back up and...the car wouldnt move. I'm assumed that the heat wash from the engine heated up whatever air i may have had in the brake lines and it locked up the brakes. I had to floor it to get it to move about 5mph into a parking lot nearby. I turned the car off and let it cool down for about 2 hours and then was able to drive it home no problem.

I spent this past weekend bleeding the hell out of the brake lines themselves, but i have no knowledge on how to do anything beyond that. I thought about taking it to a local shop to take care of it but if i can keep my money and fix it myself in an afternoon, i'd much rather do that.

Thanks,

Matt

Sounds like your brake pedal rod is to long and applying to much pressure on the system at all times thus heating up the brakes. If your master was not bench blead it needs to be and that is a seperate issue.

It sounds like you may have multiple issues happening at once. As Todd stated, if your push rod is too long, it may not be allowing the piston in the master cylinder to fully retract. This can cause the pressure at the calipers to not release and the lock-up scenario you described. A quick and dirty way to check it is to open a bleed valve on a caliper and see if that unlocks the caliper with a squirt of fluid.

Your pedal feel would certainly suffer if the system has not been fully bleed of air. It's also possible that your MC is not properly sized for your disc/disc combination or that the MC is not compatible with your setup.

Tobin
KORE3

Update: The mc was bench bled. I tracked down the manufacturing tech support guys and basically there are 2 holes on the brake pedal bracket that the rod attaches to. My friend hooked it up to the top one, which is where the old manual brake rod was attached to. The bottom one is apparently for power assist brakes. So...basically as you guys said, the rod was engaging the brakes all the time. Now i just need to re-bleed the lines and i should be good.

Thanks,

Matt