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From: Dave Armstrong, [email protected]
Date: 03 Jan 2003
Time: 07:40:56
Remote Name: 213.122.53.165
All, If I can add my own experience. A friend had a Nippy with Bowdenex brakes operating Girling type brakes. After stuffing it twice into a ditch as the only way to stop it we decided to uprate his brakes! Although the brakes were Girlings the car was/is '36 with the earlier none compensating cross shaft - more of this later. As a couple of replies have said the Bowdenex were very stiff in the outers and very hard to adjust and come 'off' after braking. For some reason with this set up the levers at the front also fouled the big bolt for the radius arm on full lock, we ended up with a bevel filed on it. Anyway we noticed that another 7 had Girling brakes but that the backplates had been rotated taking the lever to the front and the adjuster to the rear, the four mounting bolts are equally spaced allowing this. Doing this gives a much shorter Bowdenex cable. We made the shorter cables by cutting the cable through a silver soldered 'blob' and fitting one of those adjustable cable ends. By cutting the end off the inner could be dragged out of the outer and everything cleaned. We've had no trouble with stiction since. As said I think it's the umpteen years worth of sticky grease that sticks them. As part of the mods we fitted some of those really long levers to get more pulling power. To make them work and balance with the backs we had to fit a '37-'39 cross shaft to get compensation. We had noticed that the standard Bowden levers were shorter than the Girling ones. They are longer than the short Austin ones and the same length as the longer Austin ones, are they only designed to replace the short types? They would seen a backward step if replacing the longer ones? That was one of the reasons for going for the really long ones.
Did all that make sense, hope of use.
Dave A