Brake caliper upgrade?

[1968Vitesse25]

Quoted from Andy Flexney

1968Vitesse25,

you obviously missed the point, which tells me you are only looking at one small piece of the jigsaw and not the whole.

If you put on better brakes you will need to put on better (wider, stickier) tyres to get that braking power onto the road. By putting on bigger tyres you are straining the already weak suspension mountings and wheel bearings even more and therefore you will need to replace them more often.

Perhaps the Triumph TR brakes are superior to the small chassis Triumphs but I doubt it. The TR brakes will out brake the tyres and the chassis without any problem. So really before you go putting on super brakes for a road car you should start by strengthening the chassis and suspension mountings so they can take the strain of better brakes and stickier tyres.

Andy

The  small chassis suspension isn't terribly weak. Ball joints and bearings are shared with the much bigger, heavier and more powerful TR6. So either the small chassis cars bearings are over strong, or the TR6 is running on borderline bearings, and the TR6 runs much bigger and wider wheels than a Spitfire.
Triumph spent the 60's into the 70's fitting successively wider avd grippier tyres to the small cars. We saw them move from narrow crossplies on skinny rims to 155 or 165 section radials on 5.5" rims at the end, a whole world of difference in grip.

[glang]

Ahhh think Ive sussed it: the larger pads I posted are MGB633 which are for the later calipers. The slightly smaller ones are MGB525 for the earlier type 16 calipers and Mintex now dont list these however the MGB633 can be used in its place if the pin holes are drilled out.
So good news, no need to change my calipers!

[Nick Jones]

Been watching this but unable to post until now (only this computer knows my forum password and I haven't been near it).

Don't understand the confusion?

Vitesse/GT6/TR4 - 6 (at least) all use variants of the Girling type 16 caliper.

The first one is the 16P which has thicker pad retaining pins and piston dust covers which are hard to fit - used up to '69 ish
Successor is is the nearly identical 16PB, used up to '73ish which has a revised piston dust cover design and smaller pad retaining pins.
This in turn was superseded by the M16 which is the metric version.  More or less identical to the PB apart from metric threads for the hydraukic fittings and slightly bigger holes in the mounting lugs which mean they need special hybrid bolts with UNF thread and a metric shank size.  In the Triumph world these are used on later TR6 and the last GT3 Mk 3s.  (I think).

As well as Triumph usage the Type 16 caliper is used on a fair few Fords including Escorts, Cortinas, Capris and even Granadas.  They even come in wide versions for vented discs, but before you rush out and buy a pair, be aware that the Ford variants used a different hole spacing on the mounts.... bloody inconvenient!

These mostly use the same shaped pads (and this is why you can get them in a decent range of materials).  In fact until the pictures further up the thread I though they were all identical apart from the holes for the locating pins, which are easily drilled out.  Make sure you drill them big enough as they are supposed to be a fairly loose fit and if they are not the pads won't float/self-align properly.

Nick

[glang]

Thanks Nick, that covers it. My confusion came because it appears Mintex only list pads for M16 not the P and PB variants and obviously dont suggest drilling out the pin holes as youve explained to get them to fit but this is indeed what I'll do.

[Slimboyfat]

Quoted from 1968Vitesse25

The  small chassis suspension isn't terribly weak. Ball joints and bearings are shared with the much bigger, heavier and more powerful TR6.

TR's have larger top ball joints.