69 belair wrote:

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doug, what hubcaps do you have? the dog dish caps will fit on a 15" steel wheel. you would have to look twice to notice the difference 14" to 15"

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Carl Stevenson wrote:

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Ken, I was not able to find any rim that would clear the 4 piston caliper 68 disc brakes the time that I tried it. Bolt pattern, hub etc was no problem but the caliper hit the rim.

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Carl Stevenson wrote:

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Not likely the same on that setup as the B body though Carl. You will have no trouble putting a 14 on yours is my guess.

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Doug, rather than go through the trouble to make your rare car non-stock, you can greatly improve your drum brake performance.

The big Chevy and Canadian Pontiac B-body cars use 11" drums rather than the puny 9½" drums of the mid-sized cars. The big problems from drum brakes stem from heat and the related distortion of the shoes because of it. Heat also is the enemy of the asbestos material because the friction properties diminish when it heats up.

Your stock drum brakes have a leading shoe and trailing shoe made of bonded asbestos. When you use your brakes the shoes heat up and grow. As they grow within the brake drum they will distort and reduce the contact area of the friction material, also causing more intense heating in those reduced contact areas and exacerbating the problem. Meanwhile the asbestos friction material loses its effectiveness as it heats up. What you experience are brakes that almost "go away" after a few hard stops from speed.

What the factory did with the drum brakes is offer sinistered metallic brakes. The friction material is a hard iron composition, welded onto the shoes in patches. The iron friction material initially doesnt grab, but once heated up it can provide lots of friction for stopping and wont lose its grip when hot. The reason for the segmented patches rather than a single arched shoe is that as the shoe heats and expands, that expansion simply makes the iron patches grow closer to each other rather than distort the shoe. The high-performance sinistered metallic shoes also included specially treated return springs that wont fatigue like conventional return springs. These brakes wear like granite and offer sure stops with repeated use. On the flip side they wear out the drums themselves and do take a little more leg power, especially when they are cold and dont quite have the grippiness up to speed. Factory metallic brake shoes disappeared from GM option lists after 1967.

A modern alternative that I recommend is a set of high performance Kevlar brake shoes that offer the performance of metallic brakes. They are offered by Praise Dyno (http://www.praisedynobrake.com/) and will be a great upgrade for that 427 Strato Chief of yours. The car will still look stone stock but you will be able to drive it like it was meant and do so with confidence. Given how rare and unusual your car is you might well consider the Praise Dyno shoes and hardware. Replace all your flex hoses and hard lines, rebuild your master cylinder and bleed then thoroughly. At that time you might also consider silicon brake fluid since the new lines will not have any residual conventional brake fluid. Silicon brake fluid will not lift paint when it spills (a problem with conventional fluid).

Carl Stevenson wrote:

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I never knew that 67 was the last year for metallic. I know of a 67 SD car that had metallic from the factory.

Do you think it was pretty rare?

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67 SD's are rare in their own right.

The metallic shoes in Canada were only available with the 396 on Beaumonts & Chevelles (unlike the U.S. where any drum brake Chevelle could get them). I figure it must have had something to do with parts stocking on the assembly line since the completely axle assemblies had brakes on them already. In Canada there were 20 different assemblies to cover 10-bolt, 12-bolt, Positraction vs. open, and metallic. Once you begin to open up optional axle ratios choices as in the U.S., plus metallic brakes for 10-bolts as well as 12-bolts the number of axle assemblies goes up a lot to 46 axle codes in the U.S. Add to that the speedometer drive and driven gears and you are starting to see the stocking problems faced by offering more choices.

Disk brake cars still used asbestos shoes on the rear drums and (front pads) so the presence of disk brakes did not affect the stocking of different axles. For 68 GM just offered disk brakes as the ticket to upgraded braking. Metallic pads were offered on certain cars like competition Corvettes, but for drums it was history.