Finally--a little progress.

I took advantage of some down time in my other project (waiting between coats of paint) to work on the brakes. I've been anxious to get the brake lines in place, but thinking about it, I decided that I really needed to get the master cylinder in place first.

On a modern car, the master cylinder is typically located directly in front of the driver, just under the hood. Not so with cars from the early 50's. The master cylinder in my old studebaker is directly under the driver's feet, bolted to the frame.

It had been so long since my last post, that I didn't remember to take a pic until I had the master cylinder (above) almost out.

The shop manual is typically very accurate with instructions for going about this sort of thing, but in my case it failed to mention some pieces that I needed to remove to get to a couple of little clips (I suppose they thought if I couldn't figure it out I shouldn't be doing this sort of thing.) After a bit of head scratching, I finally got it out.

Old and tired master cylinder. Note the single hydraulic outlet at the back

Since I'm modernizing the braking system with front disk brakes, I also need to modernize the master cylinder. This requires a special bracket and dual master cylinder, which as you'll recall I got from Turner Brake, the same vendor who provided the disk brake conversion. Here's the bracket installed--it wasn't difficult at all.

Here's a crappy picture of a shiny master cylinder bracket.

One thing--I removed the hill holder assembly as part of this. I need to rebuild it. At this point, I'm going to set it aside, and get things running without it. It will be easy enough to plumb into the system at a later date.

Been a while; it sure feels good to be working on the ol' Stude again.