Replacing my Brakes Options

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This weekend was step one of two of replacing the brakes on my '76. The previous owner upon selling to me told me that he had rebuilt the front calipers and the brake fluid looked very nice and fresh in the master cylinder. Looks like a nice fresh tank of ATE super blue..... I will find out later that what's in that tank doesnt look like what's in the brake lines....

I started this project because when turning the wheels in the rear to set timing, I can hear the left rear brake dragging, and loudly. I feared it was a bearing, but it wasnt. The brake was dragging. I lift the car and put it on 4 jackstands, the evil kind (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sad.gif) I need some proper pin-thru stands. I have all 4 tires under the car in case the car decides it wants to smoosh me.

I'm using 4 new rebuilt calipers from Eric Shea. With these calipers are 4 new rotors, new front bearings, new seals, 4 new softlines, all new pads. A total of $1038 in parts from Eric.

From the pic...the parts are gorgeous!

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After some more investigation, it turns out that not just 1 caliper was dragging. ALL FOUR were dragging. No wonder this car feels so sluggish and tends to overheat. Besides the fact that my timing may be off and my tune may not be so great, I have a left rear caliper dragging like crazy, a front right dragging a little, left front with what sounds like shitty bearings, and a right rear that sounds quieter than the rest. Sounds like doing all 4 at the same time was a good idea!

All it takes to take off the rear calipers is a 19mm box wrench and a rubber mallet. An 11 mm wrench is what you need for the brake line itself.

My car did not come with a parking brake and the left mechanism was jammed anyway, more on that soon....

It's much easier to take off the caliper if you unclip the hardline from the trailing arm. this means you dont have to detach the hardline from the caliper right away and have a bit of wiggle room. I did this and put the 19mm on the bolts and gave them a few whacks with the rubber mallet. Surprisingly, these bolts dont seem rediculously tight like most of the bolts on this car tend to be! It was pretty easy!

First, I took off the left rear caliper.... Or should I say, I loosened the bolts on the caliper and that sucker DIDNT MOVE! It was clamped onto the rotor so hard, i needed to bang it off with the rubber mallet! It was like having a parking brake on ALL THE TIME. How I didn't go spinning out of control constantly is beyond me.

I removed the hardline from the caliper and the brake fluid that came out was red and kinda awful looking...

Here is the pic of the left rear caliper... not much room is there? No wonder the car smelled like hot brakes all the time!