Rear Brake pipes conpleted.

With my new roll of pipe, flaring tool and a rough idea of what I wanted to do I set about tackling that little pipe link from the T splitter to the rear calliper.

1st step was to get repeatable results from the flaring tool, I worked out that about 1mm protruding above the tool gave a good result whereas the instructions advised 0.5mm.

After a few practice runs I settled on using a double flare instead of a single flare. To me it looked more like the GD supplied pipes with their universal flares and it looked to be more robust than the single flare.

With the pipe cut to length and both fittings attached I was able to start bending, well it took three attempts to get a pipe that fitted. Each time I made up a new pipe and had another go.

The end result clears the cable and lever well and only time will tell if its routing will cause and problems with bits to be fitted in the future.

What I did notice when doing this is that handbrake levers are lower than those I have seen in other build pictures, this is what caused me the most trouble during this pipe work as I couldn't get a tight enough bend out of the calliper.

Anyway I found that things were not as they seemed, after completing this pipe work I realised that the levers could move up hence increasing the clearance I have achieved in the picture above.

All being well that's that job done.

Quiet Month

Been a bit of a quiet month in the garage with no real progress.

I set about fitting the two rear calliper feeds from the union, the less said about that the better. Suffice to say I now have a coil of kunifer pipe and a new end fitting on order, at least this way I can now faff about with it as much as I like until I'm really happy with it. This also gives me the opportunity to remake one of the front pipes that I was not happy with.

Left side fitted. Needs to be done again I think as its too close to the cable.

Right side, kinked it whilst bending! Is knackered.


Had a quick chat to someone at GD, didn't get his name that's not too good! Anyway was advised to use a 1" mandrel to make the initial bend out of the calliper, that should stop the pipe collapsing.

New roll of pipe and new fitting arrived so ready to give it a go this weekend.

Problem resolved.

New bolts arrived today and Im glad to say they fit perfectly! So thats its I can now carry on and shim up the discs which judging by my initial look are going to need a few shims to center them up.

Again many thanks to Ed for sorting this one out.

Calipers cause confusion....

Finally made it up to the garage last night with good intentions of fitting the calipers and shimming the rear brake discs.

However as always things conspired against me and I didn't get half of what I wanted done. I did manage to temp fit the rear discs with no shims.

However when trying to fit the caliper bolts through the problem occurred.

This is as far as the bolt goes in, in fact I gave it a little tap with my hammer and that jammed it in solid! Luckily I was able to get it out with the press but if I didn't have that it could have gotten nasty!

I managed to fish out on of my old bolts and when compared you can see a difference.

By measurement the new bolt is 11.16mm in diameter vs 10.8 for the old bolt. The hole in the caliper is around 11mm.

The old bolt fits OK in 3 of the 4 holes in the caliper but still does not quite fit in one.

A few emails to Ed at Wards and a quick conversation today and I am informed that Jaguar used 2 suppliers for their calipers for a while, this one used a slightly smaller bolt hole. Jag, in their wisdom, only have one part number for the two different bolts required. Ed is going to send me some new bolts to try.

Ill let you know how it goes!