Jason wrote:
Fiesta brakes can be poor.
A mixture of servo,master cylinder, hoses,fluid bulkhead,size and technology age.
Remember most modern cars have 15 Inch and up size wheel.
So the discs are bigger to begin with.
Then add ABS and other technologies and brakes just get better..
If only one hose was changed, I wouldn't take that as any guarantee that the fluid was changed.
So I'd recommend changing all 4 hoses and the fluid.
I had black lumps of fluid come out when I changed the fluid on my festival.
Had to use an eazi-bleed and pump the pedal to clear it.
Send the mc and calipers to bigred ( biggred? ) for refurbishment.
Pistons rust and stick inside the calipers and master cylinder.
The bulkhead.
Check all the bolts are tight.
Check for stress cracks.
The bulkheads do flex a little.
You can look at fitting a strengthener to the servo and steering rack mount and to the inner wing.
Just to triangulate a stronger mount for the servo.
Also check you have no leaks at the servo or vacuum pipe.
One other option is xr2 calipers and discs.
But I recommend still getting it refurbished for all the same reasons above.
Also. If you do upgrade. Upgrade the servo too.
I fitted xr2 front calipers to my festival.
Brakes were great. But had a tendency to lock on heavy breaking.
More than they do on my xr2.
But I would just get your current stuff serviced.
Gotta remember this stuff is 27+ years old now!
Jason.
I was going to upgrade to XR2 brakes but read that they had a tendency to lock up, my disks are the basic lower spec size of 220mm instead of the 240mm that where supplied to me first, so may be that has something to do with it, I've found some new calipers on Ebay and may invest in them at a later date.
Thanks for the advice Jason.
Cheers
Pete