Thursday, 2 May 2013

Rear brake lines

 There is a well known issue with using the VW / hydra mechanical rear callipers. Mainly the brake line banjo ends up being to close for comfort to the drive shaft gator.....Apart from this issue I wanted to use the VW callipers as they are nice and light being made of alloy. So, although I've not fitted the drive shafts yet, I have the luxury of reading the other J15 (Vectis) blogs and seeing the problem before I started.

So, how to overcome this.......while removing a set of callipers from a VW Passat at the local scrap yard, I wrenched off the ends of the brake lines. As you can see the Banjo is relatively thin, this of course means the banjo bolt is also smaller too.

This means the bolt used is considerably smaller, and if used with a thinner banjo can save a fair amount of height. Note the hole in the banjo bolt both lined up in the picture. This shows the potential as to how much height can be reduced.

My guess is around 4-5mm reduction in height would be plenty, so 2mm off each side of the banjo and 2mm off the top of the bolt will give a total of 6mm which should mean there is no chance of it catching the drive shaft
 Here it fitted...........Job done.