After haveing all the parts sitting on my work-bench for the best part of
18 months - I finally got round to installing the MGB/Spitfire brakes on
my Midget this week.
The conversion/installation was not as easy as I was led to believe.
I bought the complete conv. kit from Winner's Circle, which consists of
1 set of MGB calipers
1 set of Spitfire rotors
1 set of adaptor plates
NO instructions !!!!!.
After fiddling about for the best part of 2 hours, I finally figured out all the
separate pieces should fit. But upon actually doing the installation I found
that
the calipers would not fit and they kept fouling on the inner lips of the
rotors.
Thinking that I had a piece missing I stopped for the night and called up
Winner's
Circle yesterday morning.
Well it turns out that you have to do some very light grinding to the rotors,
the
calipers and the tie-rods ends to make evry thing fit. Sure enough after doing
the
aforementioned grinding, everything did actually fit.
How does it work ? I am not too sure at the moment because I have to spend
sometime
over the weekend to bed the pads in, rebleed the system and try again. But on
initial reacation, is that the brakes do have better stopping power that the
standard Midget brakes - I shall report back when the pads have bed in properly.
Would I do it again ? NO - I think it if you want to uprate the Midget brakes,
it
would be better to play around with pads (Ferodo or Mintex), think about fitting
a servo (from a Mini), think about vented Midget rotors (from Moss) or go the
whole hog and get Midget 4-pot calipers and 9.7" rotors (again from Moss).
gerry.
PS - is it just me, but why does Winner's Circle NEVER supply instructions with
their stuff ? I had the same problem with the Panhard rod and anti-roll bar I
ordered from them. It took me longer to figure out where all the parts fitted,
than actually installing the parts.
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