Pre '68 Dave, that's a great point; more power needs more control and the way the brake pedals work on these trucks, you don't have the fine control you might want with power brakes.
Achipmonk, do you find you have a problem with controlled brakeing as suggested by Dave?
The only real problem I have with the original brakes is at the begining of a hard, or panic brake, the truck wants to pull to the driver side momentarilly. This is due, I believe, to the fact that one brake line from the master runs to the front driver side brake while all four remaining brakes work off of another shared line. This seems to get worse when the brakes get wet.
The real reason I want to upgrade my brakes is for safety's sake. I like the way they work, but I do find myself caught up in trafic in Des Moines and other places where the brakes get a work out, and a sudden loss of brakes would be dire.
If you ask fifty people what to do about brakes, twenty five will say 'well maintained stock brakes are all you need' and the other twenty five will say 'you got to have a power dual res master with discs to be safe'.
Well, I am going to install a dual resevoir master cylinder but I want to know if power brakes is really worth it? Are disc brakes really worth it? Can I go 'middle of the road' with power drums or is that kind of pointless?
Last edited by twotone; 08/10/2015 4:05 AM.
