For years, car magazines, including this one, have waxed on about the importance of updating older manual-drum-brake cars to the stopping power of modern disc brakes. We often publish dramatic before-and-after 60-0-mph stopping tests comparing the performance of the trick new brakes to the weak stockers, and we urge you to consider stopping power to be as critical to your car's performance as acceleration power.
This time we don't need any braking data to illustrate the dramatic effects of disc brakes. One look at the picture of our '65 Ford Falcon Sprint sitting atop a rollback with a crunched front end should tell you the problem with manual drums. This unfortunate incident occurred about two years ago in stop-and-go traffic in Carson City, Nevada, during Car Craft's annual West Coast Road Trip, and to make matters worse, we plowed into the back of a reader's mint '65 Plymouth Satellite.
After an all-day thrash in Reno, we managed to get the wounded Bird back on the road, and actually drove it 800 miles back home to L.A. the next day, where we sent it to a body shop to have the core support repaired, rounded up some replacement sheetmetal, and then mothballed the car in the garage for nearly two years. Recently there's been a renewed burst of activity, including a front suspension rebuild (also in this issue), but the biggest priority before putting the Falcon back on the road was a brake upgrade. We considered three options: junkyard brakes, stock-type replacement discs, or a trick big-brake upgrade.
The most popular salvage-yard brake upgrade for early Mustangs and Falcons (which share essentially the same chassis) involves swapping on a set of '75-'80 Ford Granada spindles and discs, which use a single-piston floating-style cast-iron caliper with 11-inch rotors. We chronicled this easy swap on another Ford Falcon in our May '00 issue. The biggest drawback to the Granada swap is the increasing difficulty of finding donor cars, along with the need to buy new or rebuilt calipers, rotors, master cylinder, pads, bearings, hoses, and other parts to recondition the used brakes. You also need to change the outer tie-rod ends to mount the new spindles. In the end, all you'll probably use from the "junkyard" is the actual spindle and caliper bracket, and by the time you've finished, the swap can easily cost as much as $700.
Another option is to go the "Pro Touring" route by swapping on a set of trick oversize aftermarket brakes. Although stopping power will be uncompromised, upgrading to 12- or 13-inch rotors also requires stepping up to an expensive set of matching oversized wheels and tires to accommodate the huge rotors, and both the look and the cost may not match your goals if you don't require that level of braking performance.
The third option falls in the middle, and it's the one we chose: updating to a replacement set of factory-style disc brakes. Stainless Steel Brakes Corporation (SSBC) has been in the aftermarket brake business since 1975, and actually started out by rebuilding Corvette calipers with stainless steel sleeves, hence the name. Another of the company's longtime products is an improved version of the Kelsey-Hayes-designed four-piston fixed caliper originally used on many Ford and Mopar products in the '60s. SSBC now produces these calipers in cast-iron and aluminum versions for a variety of applications, as well as reproductions of the rest of the factory-style parts needed to retrofit a stock-type disc-brake system on these early cars. The basic replacement system for a Falcon or Mustang retails for about $925 with cast-iron calipers, but for $1,150, we chose the company's FX4 Super Duty brake system, which upgrades the basic kit to aluminum Force 10 Classic calipers, 11-inch slotted rotors, DOT-spec braided brake hoses, and EBC Greenstuff performance brake pads.
As outlined in the accompanying photos and captions, the swap was a cake-walk, and can be accomplished in a single day easily by anyone with even basic familiarity with brake systems. We almost could have driven the car home one night after work, torn it down, and had it ready for commuting the next morning, but we had to stop to take pictures, which always slows us down.
We haven't had a chance to try out the new brakes yet, because it was snowing the week we finished the job, but trust us, we can tell just by looking that it's going to stop better. It wound up costing us about $4,000 to fix both cars, so consider this disc-brake swap just a few days late and a bunch of dollars short.