Freelander 1 Brakes - Early series 1 Freelander K series

My brakes are not great. They have been like that since I've owned the car, bought in 2014. At our WoF time, MoT in the UK, the foot brake test returns 50 to 60 %. There's plenty of meat on the brake pads and shoes. The callipers had seal kits fitted about 3 years ago and new standard pads went in, and all the flexi-brake lines were replaced, as well as the brake fluid. The pedal is firm and the booster seems to do what it should do. The HDC works well too.

So why is that braking effort low?

I was wondering if the pads and shoes might have become a bit glazed. I took the brake pads out and gave them a rub with 80 grit emery and gave the disks a going over with an 80 grit flap wheel. Drums got the the same treatment and the shoes were also given a rub. But it's not much better.

What's the thinking out there?

It's pretty normal for the early FL1 to have a high pedal effort, for the amount of brake effort available.
When the brakes were improved, the rotors increased in diameter slightly, which increased mechanical advantage, the rear drums also increased in size. The master cylinder was changed, and a duel diaphragm booster was installed, which reduces pedal effort massively.
All these changes increased the brake effort available, which brought the FL1 up to more modern standards for the time.

You can retrofit all these components, if you wanted better brakes.

Better braking would be nice. The main concern for me is that, as it is, I'm continually close to failing the Wof / MoT which looks at the braking effort as a % I'm no race driver, quite conservative actually, so in my opinion the brakes work satisfactorily. I did do my own test. At 80kmh on a hard packed gravel road, braking heavily, I can pull up in about 38m. To me that's quite good.
I've read that upgrading the rotors and callipers requires the later type/size of rims too to accomodate the larger brake mechanisms. Is that the same for the rear brakes as well? New hub / shoe assembly and drums?

How do Freelanders like mine get on with the MoT testing?

htr said:

Better braking would be nice. The main concern for me is that, as it is, I'm continually close to failing the Wof / MoT which looks at the braking effort as a % I'm no race driver, quite conservative actually, so in my opinion the brakes work satisfactorily. I did do my own test. At 80kmh on a hard packed gravel road, braking heavily, I can pull up in about 38m. To me that's quite good.
I've read that upgrading the rotors and callipers requires the later type/size of rims too to accomodate the larger brake mechanisms. Is that the same for the rear brakes as well? New hub / shoe assembly and drums?

How do Freelanders like mine get on with the MoT testing?

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When we had the cars together it was noticeable that the braking on my (pre 2000) car performed better than yours. So the braking can be better. Dunno if yours has improved since then.

At the time, I had fairly new standard discs, forget what the pads were like and probably original rear brakes. I've since renewed everything on the rear. When I first put them back after that, the brakes were pretty ropey. Another big bleed and they were back to performing well.

You've obviously replaced a lot of the system on your motor. I don't know if the Wabco unit can leak fluid between channels within it, or a solenoid go 'soft' or summat. Maybe the servo isn't performing 100% - if that was the case though, you'd think it would have also degraded over time.

I've only had problems with the brakes on 1 WOF. That was an imbalance on the rears and was due to a leaking slave cylinder. That led to the rebuild of the rear brakes.

I was also given an 'advisory' once that the disks were at their limit, which led to them being replaced.

Other than that I've never had any fails/advisories about the brakes. Whether they are close to the limits of the test I don't know, I've never looked at the results and wouldn't know how to interpret them anyway. I'll have a look at the next test.

GrumpyGel said:

Whether they are close to the limits of the test I don't know, I've never looked at the results and wouldn't know how to interpret them anyway.

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In the UK, brake dynamometers often measure in Kgs of brake force on a pair of wheels at a time.
The FL1 facelift will normally apply 425 to 475 Kgs of braking force per wheel, before the tyres slip on the rollers.
My D3 front brakes pushed over 700 kgs of force, before the tyres slipped.

GrumpyGel said:

... Other than that I've never had any fails/advisories about the brakes. Whether they are close to the limits of the test I don't know, I've never looked at the results and wouldn't know how to interpret them anyway. I'll have a look at the next test.

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On the left nearly halfway down on the WoF assessment sheet there is the section "B Road Test" Brake performance is listed as a % figure - Minimum is 50% and mine is commonly just above that!

Thanks for the comments gents. I'll organise to replace the brake fluid soon and see if that helps. There's about 3+mm remaining on the brake shoes so I'll probably replace them too.

htr said:

Thanks for the comments gents. I'll organise to replace the brake fluid soon and see if that helps. There's about 3+mm remaining on the brake shoes so I'll probably replace them too.

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I got all my stuff shipped over from LRdirect.com for the rears - was surprisingly inexpensive. Went for Allmakes for the drums on advice from Nodge. Forget which shoes I went for, but I got an email to say they were out of stock of the ones I picked, so just went for another rather than wait. The OEM cylinders were dirt cheap and got a bag of original springs as they only cost a couple of bucks.

The shipping wasn't too much, but with the bits being heavy it knocked it up to quite a wide bracket, so I added other stuff like gaskets and hoses in till it skipped up the the next level, then backed out the last item added