Hello All Thought I might share my gearbox conversion in my 1928 Model A (AR). I wanted to keep the mechanical brake setup so had to keep the original clam shell set up.
I reused the original AR clamshell, as it only has 4 bolt mounting and the V8 has 6 I had to re drill the box to suit. Brendan
Is there something special about the AR clamshell in relation to the brakes? I am still running mechanical brakes and I used a v-8 clamshell. No mods necessary.
AR brakes operate off the clamshell and have a 3 piece cross shaft as you can see below (stolen pics) there are no separate park brake shoes in the rear brakes, the park brake lever operates all brakes.
This is definitely the first time I've seen someone do this swap and go through that much effort to retain the mechanical brakes. I didn't know the differences with the AR setup. I ran mechanical brakes on a 31 av8 which didn't require all that work. Very cool. Thanks for posting I love seeing this stuff!
For some reason the clings instructions said the pedal shaft had to be installed before the clutch shaft. I did it the other way round as I did not want to fit the pedals until the box was installed, I seemed to work OK
^^^^^^^^ Thanks for the detailed post above. There are two AR Fords in the shop were I work two days a week, do you plan to used the AR or A drums? That original AR setup just looks crazy to me. Bob
AR drums were not available when I rebuilt the brakes, so I used A drums, I recall the fronts are the same A or AR, the rears I used A drums and AR backing plates, no extra park brake mechanisms, I also have a flathead Teds setup installed. Here in Australia we need to do a brake test as part of the roadworthy certificate before they will grant registration, my tester said the brakes tested better than many modern cars. He used some sort of unit that measured how hard you pressed the brake pedal and how quickly you slowed.
I have read somewhere the reason for the change was to some government "experts" decided park brakes needed to be separate from the main breaking system.