Photography by Tim Suddard
More under-hood work: We needed to install master cylinders for the brakes and clutch plus a brake light switch.
What about the stock brake master cylinder? Our car originally came with a single-cylinder master cylinder, meaning no safety margin for racing or even street use. Someone had swapped in a later dual-cylinder master from a 1967 Mustang, but it’s a heavy unit.
So we turned to Wilwood for modern, lightweight alternatives.
Starting with the brakes, we ordered a 1-inch aluminum tandem master cylinder (part No. 260-8555 and MSRP is $249.42). It should work well with our manual brake system. This piece weighs about 3 pounds, so much less than the one that we replaced.
Early Mustangs are notorious for firewall flex under hard-braking applications, so we mounted the master cylinder to a Cobra Automotive firewall brace.
We also fitted a Wilwood proportioning valve to the side of the master cylinder. Why not a remote prop valve so we can make adjustments on the fly? We may opt for this setup at a later date but didn’t think we needed it just yet.
Now onto the master cylinder for our Tilton clutch. While Tilton makes a full line of master cylinders, we decided to keep our hydraulics all Wilwood for ease of servicing.
[Installing a real, multi-plate race clutch | Project vintage race Mustang]
We chose a ¾-inch bore compact remote flange mount master cylinder designed for tight spaces (part No. 260-10372 and MSRP is $104.70.)
This kit comes with a reservoir mounted on the cylinder, but for ease of filling, we opted to use the included remote reservoir.
We would need a brake light switch, too, and ours also came from the Wilwood catalog (part No. 300-11181 with an MSRP of $13.78). The switch will trigger the brake lights when system pressure reaches 60 to 100 psi.
We will get into this shortly, but we also installed Classic Tube brake lines to our new master cylinders. Once we fill our system with some fresh Wilwood XP-600 brake fluid and bleed everything, we should be good to go–well, good to stop
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