Are the brakes working properly?

[Guest]

I've got a 944 2.5 auto at the moment and it's a great drive but I wanted to change to a manual so I had a test drive in a 944S2 and a 944 turbo (both of about 1986 vintage) and compared to my 1986 auto neither of them seemed to have any brakes with excessively long pedal travel and not much happening when it got there. Is this unusual? Have I got a good auto or have I just tried some 'bad' cars (only the brakes- the rest of the car seemed fine)
cheers

 

[Fen]

Probably they need a refurb. Without going into detail (again - search on here as it's been covered already) they bind up over time. I have a scan of the 911 & Porsche World article on refurbing them on my Fotopic space here.

By the way the S2 didn't launch until '89.

 

[John Sims]

From what I understand you will get a degree more pedal travel due to the larger piston size relative to the master cylinder - it all works like levers:-

1 unit surface area master cylinder must move twice as far to compress a wheel cylinder of 2 units surface area but will impart twice the force on the wheel cylinder.

Obviously the wheel cylinders are only moving a very small distance but you do have 12 of them on a Turbo - 2 x 4 at the front and 2 x 2 at the back. IIRC the Lux has floating calipers front and back, so only 4 cylinders in total, and this is going to make things feel more direct as well.