Hey everyone, I've had my chevelle built for a long time now, but being in college and just living life has distracted me from continuing to work on it... Well, im home for the summer right now, and I wanted to try and put some good brakes up front. The car is a 1968 malibu, that I think came with the 307 engine. Its had a nasty Rat stuck in there for a while now and it needs some stopping power. It has disk brakes up front, which i think are stock... or are either regular stock ones that were put on there.... Right now the brakes work, but they are really weak. It has the stock master cylinder and a brake booster vaccumm can thats on there now. It would probably help if i just put new calipers, rotors and pads on there... but i wanted to upgrade it a bit. I was considering a big brake kit but i think that might be more than i want to spend, so i might just try and get a new master cylinder/booster with maybe an electric booster and new slotted rotors and pads. What would work best? I would like a smaller master cylinder.. maybe a 7" but would a smaller one work really good? In summit, these rotors/pads say they only go down to a 1969, so would they work on my car? http://store.summitracing.com/partdetail.asp?part=SSB%2DA2350012&view=32&N=700+150+4294894511&appfilter=1#Application

As you can tell... i need some direction... can yall please help?

I would do a little detective work first. Is the original booster working? Is there enough vac at idle for it to work? If those check out, then I think you need to look at premium pads if you don't want to drop the cash on big brakes. Old calipers and pistons can get gummy or rusty and it will really affect performance and are very easy to rebuild. Fresh fluid could help too.

Hey man, well... what is enough vaccumm? Do i need to get a vaccumm guage to hook up to the booster? Also, i was thinkin about just getting some new rotors,pads and calipers like you said to see if it helped much... but I think that i do have a vaccumm problem... After checking the vaccumm and doing all that, I will see how it is first. Thanks for the help! Anyone else?

I run manual discs, so I'm not familiar with how much vaccuum you need. But a simple test is to block of your vac booster and if nothing changes then you know it has failed.

I think anything under 14" is not good for power assist. Big brakes can be a slippery ($$$$) slope to head down if funds are tight.....I'm getting ready to buy my third MC to get to get them right.