[1965gp]

My 72 TA has been like this car- I swear I’ve done everything on that car twice!

I like to see these being built. I’m still looking for a Can Am to replace mine that rusted away

[73LeMans]

Many of you may have noticed the new brake booster and master cylinder conspicuously lurking about in many of the pictures posted so far. I haven't been speaking to it because its only been mounted with some lines and hasn't given me any problems. That is until now. But lets "stop" right there and start from the beginning.

In case you haven't seen the new system, lets take a closer look -



That is the Tuff Stuff 9" booster with Wilwoods tandem master cylinder and prop valve. I love it. You want to know the real reason for going this route? Crappy master cylinders, that's why. I have been taking the time to detail mine (ever since that HPP Shootout in '06) and I paint them up nice and take care not to ever get any fluid on it. Then the car sits. Then I drive it. Then it sits. Then I drive it. Then it sits. Then I drive it. Then it sits. As that routine is burned in, these MCs don't seem to stand up very long. The seal lets go and then you have a squishy pedal and brake fluid to contend with along with having to buy another crap shoot of a cylinder. I'm tired of replacing these store bought pieces of crapola and I'm not going to take it any more!

I'm hoping the Wilwood MC serves me well for a long time. If anyone has anything bad to say about them, please don't say it to me. If I ask, please lie and tell me they are the the best thing you ever bought. I cant take anything but good news at this point in the build.

The 9" booster was a easy choice. The original style 11" was always in the way with the sheet metal valve covers. I just hope the smaller booster generates enough push to allow me to feel comfortable slowing down. It should. it has more overall surface area. Plus I've got a vacuum can, so I should be OK....I hope. Needless to say, first, second and third drives will be quite pensive.

The decision to even stay w/power I'm questioning in retrospect. I may switch it all out for manual brakes if it proves to be an issue. The thought of re-bending all those lines again makes my thumbs hurt, so for now, I'll just pretend everything is OK.

Besides my buddy threading this adapter into the master without anti seize and us then having to carefully extract it without ruining either part -



...I had no problems with installation. That is, until I went to put fluid in.

Now most guys would look at that angle of attack and instantly know the master was sitting too high. Not me. It was off this car for a long time by this point, and while there was something that kept drawing my eye to it, I couldn't put my finger on it. I just thought it was newpartawesomenessnessness.

Turns out, the Wilwood MC has a hole in the divider wall, not at the top of the reservoir like the OEM style, but in the middle of the divider itself. This makes it awful difficult to pour in fluid and have any in the front reservoir actually stay there as the rear overflows. Dang. This would have been nice to know, say, 6 months prior when I bought this thing.

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Tip#13: Do not buy any mail order parts until you are ready to mock them up, make adjustments to surrounding pieces to fit, tear them down, clean sand and refinish the surrounding areas, and permanently remount and test all within the return period of the aforementioned mail order company. I get stuck with so many parts just trying to plan ahead and be proactive. Don't be proactive!
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Anyway, I spoke to Wilwood at SEMA just to confirm this is the right part for my application. Their recommendation was a simple one. Buy some angle reducing brackets and mount the booster using those.

Here is the problem with that. The stock firewall mount for the booster is angled at something like 17 degrees. Thats fine for stock boosters and MCs, but not for the longer booster and longer MC combination. Wilwood needs to see this this MC come in at about 9 degrees. The problem is this is a 73, and of course, that means its different than anything else prior to it. Regular angle reducing brackets will not work without extensive modification. Allow me to explain...


The stock booster bracket is a unique piece - check it out - I did not modify this in any way. Order a power booster for 73 LeMans, and you'll get this piece along with it. All I did was grind off the rivets holding it on to the booster.

Firewall side



Booster side



As you can see, different bolt patterns on each side, and an odd pattern across the piece on the firewall side.

The new brackets will definitely reduce the angle...



..but they present a problem when you try and line them up with the studs coming out of the firewall. On the drivers side of the 73 firewall, there are two studs, and three holes in the firewall. You can kinda see it in this picture. The newer looking, zinc plated "stud" is just a bolt I sent through the firewall from the passenger compartment.



I can't use the factory top stud because the booster won't line up properly with the big hole in the firewall if I do. (I'm sticking with the "There is no way in hell I'm modifying a freshly painted firewall" attitude btw) Using the middle "stud" is not a problem until you get to the passenger side of the mount. There are only two studs over there, but they are parallel with the middle and top studs on the drivers side, not the middle and bottom like the reduced angle bracket is expecting. Sooo, not only do I need to cut the reduced angle bracket so it mimics the short run of the booster mount, I need to lengthen the other end, so I can drill a hole through it and mount it to the firewall. All while keeping the angles between the two consistent. Yeah, OK.

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Solution: Pie cut the stock booster bracket.
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My nephews father in law works with pumps for a large state run transportation organization. He and his team are great with welders and are very familiar working with aluminum. I am not. (no TIG recall). I told them what I needed, and this is what I got:






This has got to be one of the slickest parts on the car. A stock looking, reduced angle booster bracket. Check out how the booster sits now.



It screws up my custom bent brake lines a tad, but it serves me right for thinking something would work the first time through. This is hot rodding after all.

[73LeMans]

Lets face it, headers and oil filters don't seem to like each other much. And the more you lean toward a "race" engine, the more these two items assume the position of Russia and OPEC. Til now, I've been able to run a factory adapter with a NAPA 1258 filter on all of my builds but with this latest set of headers, my luck is just about to run out.

The idea of a remote oil filter does not intrigue me. Like 50w on a cold morning, my brain churned this slowly over for months before the header builder made any decision for me. So many things to consider by moving one simple, but well designed part -

- Will there be a pressure loss?
- Am I straining the pump?
- Are the lines big enough?
- Now that I've deleted the factory bypass, do I need another one?
- Can the oil filter handle filtering 100% of the load without a bypass?
- Should I get an oil filter with a bypass built in?
- Will I starve my bearings if Ive made any of the wrong choices above?
- Where the heck will I put it?


Now that I absolutely had to do it, I needed to get thinking on how it was going to get done. After a lot of reading, careful consideration, much deliberation, careful contemplation, rumination, and cogitation, this is where I ended up -

Nitemare Performance

Its a decent kit, with a decent price, with all I needed, along with some proven results. (if I'm to believe the sales hype). Here my problem. They are expecting you to mount this kit on the firewall. There is still no way in hell I'm modifying my freshly painted firewall to mount an oil filter. Not just because its my firewall, I just don't think its the most attractive thing to look at. (and because its my freshly painted firewall)

With all that real estate gone though, where the heck was I going to put this thing? (About now was the 439th time Ive regretted not putting in fender wells. So much easier when that metal is just begging for something to do.)

With necessity being the mother of invention, (and this was a mother) I decided the only logical place this could work would be under the passenger foot well. As a result, I only bought the pieces from Nitemare that I needed, which were the adapter block and the remote filter block.

There is no doubt this is quality stuff. This unit is beefy:



And I love this idea -


The only issue was the remote filter block was far bigger than I thought. Having it in my hand, I can see now it has a 0% possibility of mounting it in the space available. I thought about cutting out the passenger floor and making an alcove for this to sit, but it would present issues trying to actually get to the fittings. I had to find another way. Next!

Moroso makes a remote mount that might fit a little better. It doesn't have the grooved oil ring which is a bummer, but it appeared a bit smaller in the pictures. I ordered one up and when it arrived, mocked it up into place. After some slight modification, I got it to sit up higher than the previous piece by a considerable amount, so I made a bracket to mount it to my frame.



I had to shave off about 1" of material from the top port to get it to fit up tight to the floorboard. It was threaded all the way down, so it didn't hurt it any -



Now seems like a good time to re-post Tip 12.

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Tip#12 - A lot of companies are more than happy to share their technical drawings with you, should you ask. Much easier having all of the measurements in a digital format like pdf, than to transcribe all my crummy scribbling that may or may not be 100% accurate. (Some companies even supply 3D models if you're capable to handle them)
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Yeah, all the time making a bracket, drilling holes, making sure it could handle vibration, the lines had a good path blah blah blah... wasted. As mentioned, I did mock this up prior to doing all of this, but with the car is up on jack stands - has been for months now - it makes it difficult to really know what it will ultimately look like when its on the ground. I thought I could deal with it once it was mounted, but after a week of looking at it, staring at it, loathing it, I had to replace it. And I really like that bracket too....

Mounting it underneath the car with filter attached made it look like a diesel truck. I might as well have gotten a water separator and train horn to complete the transformation. No matter how close to the floorboard I got the bracket, the entire filter could still be seen from the side of the car. (and there was no way I was taking a picture of that ugly thing) Barring those unsightly aesthetics, the filter would also be tad too close to the ground for my liking. Any hard or unexpected landing at the track, (and they would have to be hard like, I got bigger problems than my oil filter hard) might upset this filter and drag oil all over the place. No sense in chancing it.

If I'm being positive, which I'm really trying to be, the Moroso piece was Chevy designed anyway. Mounting it on the passenger side of the car, where our oil filters are of course, meant having the inlet toward the back of the vehicle. That's a lot of extra hose to run to make a nice sweep into it. Its either that or a 90 degree fitting and I refuse to use those on any fluid path. At least the Nitemare piece entered from the proper side!

The only realistic option was to lay the filter on its side. Now I needed a remote filter block that passed all its fluid through the top. Do they even make those??

Enter Peterson Fluid Systems

This part is definitely coming on vacation with the gnome. It might as well have just solved world peace! Check it out - Its pretty "slick". (cmon now, Ive been good so far!) It got dining room table status!



Now all that is needed is a way to mount it.

Through the magic of the interweb, I present you bracket 2.0.1:






It sure is ugly, but with some paint and a few bolts, this is what it looks like in use - solid as a rock



And you can barely see the test filter from the side of the car -




It barely has 1/8" of an inch before it hits the xmember on the way out, but it drops out and goes up straight so there is no chance of cross threading.

Some good quality DEI wrap to keep it from taking on any of that header heat, and we're in business.





The car has no official mileage on this build just yet, but startups have been many. PSI has been instant and consistent with no sign of any issue whatsoever.

The biggest plus is oil changes are a breeze. Gone are the days of a messy ordeal with smokey fire ups from residual oil on the header. I've done my first oil change after break in just to get all the assembly lube out. It all went to plan. (Oil looked great btw - no glitter. I have yet to open the filter)

Time will tell if all of the right moves have been made here.