Brakes

Front brakes are Golf 1 calipers, mounted on a bracket I bought from the back of Car Magazine years ago.

The anti-rattle clips go in like this.

December 2013

I had a hard time fitting the brake pads until I wheeled the Puma out into bright sunlight to have a close look. The bracket was just interfering with the inner pad. Quick to fix if you have an angle grinder.

Sorted.

I tried quite a few ways of routing the flexible brake lines (ISTR I had them especially made up? They might be a bit long) from the calipers to the chassis. This worked out best in terms of clearance and not rubbing against too many things.

I’m using a VW Golf II master cylinder.  It answers to part numbers 191611019, H2098602, 53754013283 and 139085. My options were to either shorten the pushrod from the brake pedal, or to space the MC further towards the front of the car than the original cylinder, I went with the latter using pieces of threaded rod. I am sort of concerned about the whole thing flexing up and down, but I think the force is mostly in line with the bore and I must say, the cylinder seems quite stable.

Feeding the master cylinder is going to be a bit tricky I think. Beetle dual master cylinders have input grommets of (OD/ID) 24/11mm or 18/7mm, but the Golf input is 22/12mm (grommet part number 357611817). There are adaptors to connect a flex hose to the Beetle cylinder, but I don’t think anything like that exists for the Golf. And I don’t really want my brake fluid reservoir under the fuel tank where I can’t get at it (although as far as I know the Golf reservoir has a low fluid warning, I can wire that up to the dashboard and pretty much forget about it. And it is sort of accessible by removing the wheel).

• California Import Parts has a nice brake system diagram.
• Everything you need to know about brakes on ShopTalkForum.