At one stage when I lived in an inner suburb of Melbourne, my only car (a '37 Ruby which hadn't had much attention during it's previous life -3 owners, 2 of whom were in the same family) was used by me to go into the City frequently, at least once a week, usually in peak hours. If you remember that 'A' doesn't just stand for Austin, it also requires A for Alertness, A for Anticipation and A for Avoidance, you should keep out of any trouble. Good Luck, Cheers, Bill in Oz
Decel is 44 ft/sec squared divided by 2xdistance. The figure is then expressed as a fraction of 1G, 32 ft/sec/sec The legal requirment here reduces to .5G from low speed but an unrealistic .4G for 2 wheel brakes. Fortunately the old codgers who test old cars ignore the latter! (Applied to trucks it is all a bit of a fraud as the initial delay of the air sytems are more or less ignored! Something else to ponder when being tailgated by 50 tons in your 75% late Rubuy or better special!)
Rolling roads are misleading as all the lead effects etc get confused. And the pad type only assess very low speed.
The Tapley meters must require care. If the car is brought to a full stop the final jerk confuses them.
Has the car in question semi Girling or the simple earlier brakes?
Austin seemed very carelss with many publications. The ignition timing in early Ruby book and copied far and wide has caused enormous strife. Many of the parts diagrams are wierd ie straight cut diff pinion.
As was said very early in a reply to your post, making sure that everything is in perfect condition and adjusted properly will help produce the best results - bear in mind that for the brake shoes to transmit all the braking effort applied to the rotating drum requires a lot of effort and some of that effort is wasted, which gives the impression that the brakes are poor. Modern car braking systems are all very powerful and driving a pre-war car after a modern can seem quite alarming, so there is a degree of perception on how it all feels.
On my Ruby, I did a hydraulic brake conversion, the brakes are very predictable and effective, my car has been on a rolling road (I MoT tested it last summer) and the braking performance was perfectly adequate. Out on the road, I do not think about the brakes, they just do what is required. I need this where I live as the roads are busy with heavy traffic pretty much all the time.
The brakes on my Swallow saloon are cable, I will be renewing all parts as part of the car's return to the road in due course, a hydraulic brake conversion is a lot of work and I don't really want to do it again, but with the Swallow, I do wish to improve the efficiency of the brake's operation by changing the front wheel arrangement of leading & trailing shoes to a twin leading shoe set-up (which the hydraulic arrangement has) and the "self-servo" effect will help with the braking efficiency. I know Oxfordshire Sevens do a conversion kit and there was an article here on these hallowed pages on how to change the set-up, and that may be a way forward to consider.
I would suggest getting your existing system as good as you can, then, if you are not satisfied (give yourself time to get used to their performance), think about upgrading.
Draw comfort from the fact that there are still a lot of Sevens on the road and I can't recall many incidents of owners driving them into things - though depressingly the converse does occur. It's all about watching the road ahead (a valuable survival skill, whatever you drive).
Of course it's nice to know that you can if you need to, but I've rarely used the brakes on my modern car harder than 0.5g.
Of course your phone is likely to have a passably accurate accelerometer, on the google play store there are dozens of free apps you could use to see if you are close to the 50% (5m/s) mark. You will need a passenger, the younger the better :-)
Mike's right about brakes as an optional extra - even when they work adequately. My daily driver RP is still running with the brake linings that I fitted when I restored it in 1973/4.
I drive moderns in the same way. A helpful man once jumped out of his car at traffic lights; "Your brake lights aren't working. I've followed you for the last fifteen miles and they haven't come on once!"
Hi Bob, you asked whether the brakes were Girling or the simple earlier brakes, not a simple answer.....
My Ruby's Chassis number is 247862 and she was first registered July 1st 1936 so she was towards the end of the early Ruby's production line.
The front brakes have what is described as Lozenge shaped back plates and the shoes are different from the normal earlier Ruby brakes with an offset pinion at the top and are steel, see first attached pic.
The brake drums are also not standard.
The rear brakes are of the semi Girling type, see second pic.
I purchased the car some 35 years and started the restoration but family and circumstances took over and the work stopped and so it was only in 2016 I restarted the rebuild, the picture taken are at the start of the 2016 rebuild.
The car when purchased was an empty steel shell on a rolling chassis with everything else in boxes, loads of them, including a vast array of other parts including engines, gear boxes, dynamos, starters etc.
All the internal woodwork was missing, including door frames and rear seat.
The body had been liberally patched together with lots of aluminium sheeting and copious amounts of body filler.
The type of brakes fitted now are the same as when purchased, however I have replaced all the bushes, linings, cams, cables etc. front and rear and have had new expanders machined and case hardened on the Girling brakes.
Both fronts and rear brakes have shims between the linings and the brake shoes and there are "shoes" fitted to the ends of the brake shoes, worn versions of these were in place on the original system, these have all been replaced.
At the time of purchase, I contacted one of the A7 guru's, Jack French and had a long discussion and follow up correspondence with him by post, long before the time of the internet.
He was of the opinion that as my Ruby was at the tail end of the production line Ruby may well have left the factory with this arrangement as parts ran out of the original design they would have used what was available, however I have no proof of that, but Jack French was well respected and as knowledgeable as there was around, and I was not about to argue.
Hope all this makes sense
Cheers Denis S
14-02-2019, 08:07 PM (This post was last modified: 14-02-2019, 08:10 PM by Bob Culver.)
The semi Girling cars have a more elaborate cross shaft which, properly adjusted, gives front/rear balance.
For the same length levers the Girling sytem has much greater leverage so with the later cross shaft I would expect the rear brakes to predominate, maybe even lock.
With the earlier 1932-36 cross shaft the importance of firm location of front axle was recently laboured but I cannot recall just where. With reduced leverage and lesser lever movement the usual recommendation for distict front lead may result in rears doing little.
