I thought you meant tearing into everything under the sheetmetal.
Not at all. I’ve seen some beautiful restorations at some car local car shows. And the cars I’m mainly talking about are from the 60’s and 70’s. One vehicle in particular was a 67 Malibu SS. The owner put on 4 disc brakes…Rebuilt the engine…replace ignition with Electronic ignition…added a modern EFI system. Did a complete body off frame restoration. Sand blasted the body and frame. Replace panels with new…patched the body when he could. Kept the original seats…just had the reupholstered. New carpeting…new floor pan. New stereo (although he didn’t go overboard). New $10k paint job. The vehicle is beautiful. He was offered $50k for it…and turned it down.
Nice. Those are usually the guys that I talk to at cruise nights. I’ve put disc brakes on the bug and rebuilt its engine. I want to put discs on the 52 truck front but would also like to add a brake booster, which will be tricky to do on that truck. The rambler is bone stock as it is a survivor vehicle. I don’t want to mess with that one at all, other than to keep it running well.
Sweet!
I can still kick myself for not snagging a 66 Corvair up from a Jersey guy that was selling a bunch of bug parts. All he wanted to $1600 and was moving in a couple of days so wanted it gone. It was stock, it ran (poorly) but had been garaged!
My rambler has 19K on the clock. Literally driven by an old lady that stopped driving it and just parked it. When she passed away, the family didn’t want it but wanted to sell the house. Having learned from the Corvair, I couldn’t let that one get away.
I’ve let more then a few go…mainly because of family. Needed to spend my money on other things. But I only have one more to go through college. And after that I plan on retiring and buy myself a nice fixer-upper to play with when I retire.
I’ll toss my vote here, too. Forget the airbags, they can harm you as well as help you. You don’t have the engineering resources, as several posters here have already noted. If you have good seatbelts, you do not need a steering wheel or dash airbag.
Lap belts, 3 point belts or 4 point belts can be installed in an older car but unless you know your way around a toolbox and maybe a welder, let someone more qualified do this. A hot rod, restoration or race shop should be able to handle it.
Same for the disk brakes. I highly recommend upgrading from a single (pre-'66) master cylinder to a dual and at least disk brakes for the front. This may require a different master cylinder, a different proportioning valve as well as the brakes themselves. This is a VERY popular upgrade and kits are available for most domestic cars and trucks from a variety of sources. Wilwood is a good choice as they have lots of kits for lots of cars.
@MikeInNH…I guess I should have stated "modern airbag systems. The early airbag system was operated electromechanically and were generally regarded as dangerous. Kind of like a cocked and loaded shotgun in the passenger compartment. I regard them as “airbag” systems in name only.
Remaining true to the original car is most important for a collector grade car. If it isn’t a numbers matching classic, it isn’t that big a deal. There are a lot of dirver’s classics that have been changed to suit the owner. All hot rods fit this description. Leno put Corvette suspension, brakes and drivetrain on his Roadmaster. Safety upgrades are just fine. In the case of brakes, just keep the shoe brake system in the garage and if the next owner wants to take the discs off, he has the option.
If you cannot put in a shoulder harness, would a padded dash be out of the question? Wifey has crowned front teeth from kissing a metal dash in an accident.
“modern airbags could be fitted to a classic car, but by the time you got that done, you’d have spent enough money to buy a much nicer classic car.”
A bigger problem than the dollar cost is the question of exactly how those airbags would function in a crash.
In the absence of destructive crash testing of several samples of the exact same classic model, the owner would have no idea of how those airbags would function in a crash…or if they would actually function at all.
In the four wheel drive world, there’s a lot of interest in replacing drum brakes w/disc brakes on older 4wd vehicles, like from the 70’s. And for many of these older cars, the ones that had a lot of sales volume at least, there are often vendors who can supply the parts to do it; and the expense seems fairly reasonable. I’ve been looking to doing this on my early 70’s Ford truck in fact, replace the front drums with discs, and maybe add a power brake booster too. What the heck. I think when I looked into this last year, I could purchase all the parts for a little over $1,000.
I’m also interested in buying a 1967 VW Beetle. But these Beetles from that era are not entirely safe, as the front where the engine should be is where the gas tank is instead, and there’s little to protect the gas tank and driver from a front collision. I’d like to come up with an idea to solve that problem for my 1967 Beetle (which I don’t yet have). I’m wondering if somebody sells an airbag kit that will fit in the boot area (above the gas tank, in the front.)? Seems like it would help in a front collision, protecting both the gas tank so gas didn’t get spilled out, and the driver.
I would not bother to switch out drum for disk brakes. Drum brakes are fine and plenty powerful. Are you driving at high speeds in the mountains? Do you take this old car out on heavy rainy days? Drum brakes can fade on long steep downhill grades, but you can either limit this kind of driving or use a downshift to a lower gear. Rain is not a problem for drum brakes as long as you avoid deep puddles and flooded roads. If you understand drum brakes you can work around their limitations and have plenty strong brakes when you need them. Disk brakes are not more powerful than drum brakes.
Disks brakes shed water quicker, dry out quicker, and are less prone to fade due to high heat build up in racing or long down hill braking situations. But, drum brakes are plenty powerful and can stop a car just fine if they are working properly.
Padded dashboard were optional years ago. You can get replacement pads from J.C. Whitney for cars back to the 60s. I paid extra fro the padding on my 65 Dodge dart. The pads cost about $300-$500.
Re drum brakes. The main reason I’m considering to switch is I’ve always every since I had this truck – close to new when I bought it – some annoying pulling one direction or the other when braking. I’m thinking I can get rid of that with disc brakes. Plus disk brakes are easier to service.
But, drum brakes are plenty powerful and can stop a car just fine if they are working properly.
When ever I had to work on a drum brake that had a problem…90% of the time it was the adjuster. Some vehicle always seem to have had problems not adjusting properly. You never had that problem with disc brakes.
Many car clubs and organizations have even added rules for their contests that seat belts added to cars that didn’t come with them can not be counted as a bad thing, and will not result in a deduction of points during show judging.
@GeorgeSanJose since drum brakes are not common anymore, many shops don’t service them well. There is a lead shoe and a trailing shoe and if they are installed backwards it will result in uneven braking. Also the springs in the drum brakes are needed to pull the shoes off the drums and most shops reuse old springs which get rusty and stuck and cause problems.
Your best bet is to completely strip all the old hardware and replace with all new stuff. New springs, retainer clips, adjusters, everything. What seems to be happening is one brake is engaging slightly sooner than the other side. Rusty and stuck adjusters would mean one sides shoes are closer to the drum than the other side and would be one reason for this symptom.
You may need to use a manual adjusting tool to get them in balance. I remember adjusting a couple of drum brake cars when I was a kid. You get the car on a lift and loosen the adjuster until the wheel spins easily, then you tighten until you start to feel drag (friction) from the brake. Then back off about 2 clicks. Do the same for the other 3 wheels and if the brakes are working properly they should brake evenly from then on.
That’s another reason to switch to disc brakes. They are so much easier to replace. Even if you have to replace a caliper they are easier to replace then just the shoes of drum brake system. On some vehicles those springs can be a real bear to replace.
The drum brakes stop the truck ok, just the never-sure-which-direction pulling has always been annoying to me. I manually adjust the truck’s brakes on all 4 wheels, usually twice a year, the method as mentioned by Turbo above, which does minimize the pulling; but problematic pulling returns eventually. Good advice. If I don’t feel like it is worth it to pony up the $1000 for the switch to discs, when it comes time to replace the shoes, I’ll do as Turbo says, just replace everything, the shoes, the springs, the clips, and the adjusters, and re-true the drums. Thanks for good comments everybody.