[68WarDog]

Originally Posted by JLMounce

Call me a believer.

For 10 years or so and specifically in the last 3 years I have really chased performance issues with the braking of my Firebird. It had basic stock type components on it to create a 4 wheel power disc system.

It consisted originally of a single 9" diaphragm power booster which clamped GM D52 calipers on 11" rotors in the front and GM Metric calipers on 11" rotors in the rear. In this configuration, the braking was adequate. It would stop decently, but never really wanted to lock up the wheels.

In 2022 the power booster failed and the decade + aged calipers had started to leak and really just looked like crap.

Last year I replaced the calipers with Wilwood variants of the D52 and Metric calipers and had a rough time with it. This is what led me to discover the power booster was failed/failing. I had determined through speaking with several different people that the booster just wasn't adequate for the type of vacuum I was pulling. On the edge, so the single 9" diaphragm just wasn't adding enough pressure to the system.

I opted for a TuffStuff dual 9" designed around the C3 braking system. With the massive 6.28" front and 4" rear piston areas, combined with the larger power booster, the car stopped very well, now able to lock the wheels when needed. However the pedal feel as atrocious. The booster worked so well that it slammed all the pressure into the calipers as soon as you touched the pedal. Very little firmness from the pedal and zero feedback. It was like the first time you try left foot braking and your foot is asleep at the same time.

You can imagine, in traffic this was pretty terrible to deal with. You were going or stopping, not really anywhere in between.

I've been wanting to change the wheels and tires on the car for a while for a bit different look and figured if I was going to do that, now would be the time to re-engineer the brake system, in case my track widths changed.

With a bit of trepidation, I opted to go with an upsized Wilwood package in the front and rear and matched it with a 15/16" manual master. The system consists of a 12.88" front rotor with the Forged Narrow Superlight 6 piston caliper in the front and a 12.19" rear rotor with the Forged Dynalight 4 piston caliper in the rear.

I was able to get the system bled out and the pads bedded in yesterday and got some drive time in. I can tell you, I should have done this years ago.

Yes, the pedal effort is increased, but not in a bad way. It's nothing like a hard pedal with a bad power booster where it's just needless hard with no stop. You feel the pads come on to the rotor and you can feel the adhesion of the tires to the ground. It's super easy to modulate what you want the car to do. Actuation is quite linear and the pedal is always doing what you expect it to do and how you expect it to feel.

If you're on the fence about going with a manual setup over a power setup, the only thing that might sway me away from manual at this point is if the car is daily driven in stop and go traffic. The increased pedal firmness isn't that much of an increase. In fact I don't think my pedal is much firmer than the pedal on my wife's '13 Corvette. The feel is just so good as to override any issues with the firmer pedal.

As an added bonus, I now have zero vacuum accessories that I need to worry about having an engine support.

What size wheels are you able to use with the new rotors? I will soon be getting the Willwood manual brakes system,. However I will retain my 15" Rally 2s.