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May, 28th. Last week I took the car to a show
about 20 miles away and everything was fine on the way over but that
wasn't the case on the way home. While exiting the freeway I noticed the
brakes were dragging pretty bad and I wondered why. Time to get to the
bottom of what happened. Once I had the car home I put it back on the
jack-stands to check things out and I think I found the answer to what
happened. I believe it was a two fold problem with one of them being my
fault and the other a heat related issue. As you can see in the
picture below the exhaust runs right next to my master cylinder. Even
though I had insulation covering the exhaust pipe I believe the fluid in
the master got hot enough to expand to cause my problem. Now this is
only part of the equation because the day before I went to the show, I
had adjusted my brakes one last time. The reason I adjusted them again
was because the pedal seemed to travel a little to far and this was to
help that condition. But with me making the pedal a little firmer with
that last adjustment turned out to be a recipe for disaster.
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| To help fix the problem I thought buying some new
insulation would be a good place to start. The old stuff I had been
using worked great for many years but after looking at this new stuff I
could see there were a couple of improvements made. The product that I'm
using is made by
Thermo Tec and they have
a lot of different products to help with heat related issues.
One improvement that I saw was the use of some metal pads (arrow)
that sit against the exhaust pipe. These pad helps create an air gap
between the insulation and the hot exhaust pipe which is something my
other stuff didn't have (I'll show you more about that later).
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These kits come in a few different lengths and I bought the one that was
three feet long by 6" wide and it comes with seven stainless steel hose
clamps. After measuring a couple of things I cut a piece off that was
about 12 to 14 inches long to place over my master cylinder. The
remainder will be placed over the exhaust pipe later.
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Here you can see the insulation in place and I left it a little long to
be trimmed later. The round silver stuff that you see wrapped around my
brake lines is another product made by the same company that I had
leftover from years ago. I figured that I'd use this round insulation
along with the new stuff just to make sure. To hold the round stuff in
place I used some stainless steel tie-wraps that are also made by Thermo
Tec.
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Here is another view of the insulation and you can also see one of the
hose clamps wrapped around the master cylinder adapter. I'm not sure if
this will work so I have one more thing that I want to try.
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What I'm trying to show you is how close the exhaust pipe is to my
chassis. The square piece that is next to the exhaust pipe is only about
3/8 to 1/2 inch away from it but if I could get the tubing right next to
the chassis, I'd gain some much needed room.
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What I plan to do is clamp the exhaust pipe against the
chassis which would give me the maximum clearance possible between the
master cylinder and that hot exhaust pipe. What you see below are some
clamps that I made out of 1/8" thick aluminum plate. By placing one of
them against the chassis and the other one on the far side of the
exhaust pipe, I should be able to clamp these together and pull the pipe
against the frame.
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