my 66 has 9" drums manual brakes. i want to do power brakes but i want to keep my drum brakes. has anyone used power drums?

 

This may seem like an ignorant question but why add a brake booster and keep the drums?

Drum brakes are not nearly as efficient at stopping the car and require regular maintenance. discs don't.

An argument about keeping the car as it was built is out the window because if it didn't come with a booster to begin with you are already modifying it.

 

i was just wondering if power drums would be a good idea. its going to be my weekend car

 

Not a horrible idea. Personally, I'd rather have manual discs than power drums, but power drums are still better than manual drums

 

Im a big fan of my manual disc setup. I dont find the pedal effort to be overly difficult. It takes quite a bit more effort to reach max braking threshold than a modern car but I find this to be quite useful as it allows me to reach threshold braking easier and with less chance of overshoot because you can actually feel what you are doing. I find some modern setups so aggressively boosted that the difference between a nice stop and threshold brakes is too close pedal effort wise making it too easy to overshoot threshold....Buuut that could be because I know my horse well and end up driving a different one knowing nothing else so I automatically dont like it.

-Gun

 

Yeah. Ford. Power drums were optional on all years. In fact, power drum was the only brake upgrade available 64-70 in six cylinder cars.

Typically, people worry about the drum brakes on these cars because it just doesn't feel like their 2008 Nissan. That's because it has no power boost.

The drum brakes on a V8 have almost exactly the same swept area as a disc brake. This means in one panic stop, it'll be almost identical, disc or drum. The difference is drums are slower to recover when hot, or wet. This means that while a panic stop is about the same, repeated hard use will fade a drum brake. OK on the street, but if you were to, say, autocross the car, the brakes would be pretty much gone by about the third turn.