This was the original brake pedal fitted to the car.
The more I studied it, the scarier it got. Apart from the poorly set up balance bar, it wasn’t fitted securely to the car. The bracket it pivoted on was held on by two bolts through the floor which was a steel sheet approx 1-1.6mm thick. The bolts were located side by side so there was effectively no leverage advantage to reduce the load on the floor. Over time this had bent and I’d expect it to fail. You always want a brake pedal to fail when you’re pushing on it hard, it makes life that little bit more exciting.
My metalworking skills at the time were non-existent, but I could cut things and drill holes so I made a thing out of two square sections and some L sections rivetted together. This then bolted through the floor and I had reinforcing plates underneath.
A bit of paint and I had a brake pedal I could put a bit more faith in.
Fast forward about 7 years, and the poor spacing of the master cylinders was bugging me. I threw some money at OBP Motorsport a bought a shiny new one.
This correctly spaced the cylinders, now I needed to mount it somehow. I cut out where the cylinders used to be and made a plate to bolt it all together.
In this picture you can see the two original useless bolt holes that started this work off in the first place.
Getting all the bolts in to hold it in place left some knuckle skin behind, but yet more paint hides several sins.
This isn’t quite how it ended up as it was too easy to press the accelerator when pushing the brake, so I moved the pedal over on the lever. The height difference between the pedals make braking tricky unless I remember to lift my foot higher when I go for the brakes.
One final piece of advice. If you are making your own brake pipes, make sure the fittings are in the right place before you bend them.
