Morris Minor Owners Club

I see quite a few people have adapted the brake system and fitted a pedal box set up generally from the marina. Are there any advantages to this or is this just a case of wanting to be different? Cheers

a lot depends on what is the donor for the pedal box, i'm not sure but even between some marinas and itals, some pedal boxes come with hydraulic clutch, and some have a 'dual circuit' brake master cylinder. I know the pedal box on my Monty has hydraulic clutch and i think it has dual circuit brakes, but keep meaning to check! But it's possible that not all have all the features.

If you get the right one, the advantage is that you get all the mod cons in one package. So you get a hydraulic clutch operation, dual circuit brakes (so that if you have a pipe brake or wheel cylinder burst, you only loose 2 wheels of braking, not all braking as with a standard minor), and a built in servo. It also gives you two handy reservoirs on the bulkhead to allow you to check and top up both fluids with ease.

The downsides are that you have to cut a hole in your bulkhead, and weld in a mounting box to mount the unit, and you have to bend one of the pedals so that it doesn't rub or foul on the steering column. The other downside is parts availabilty, i believe a lot of parts are similar to triumph, but knowing which triumph is the difficult bit! It's also hard to reverse if you ever want to change back to standard.

The pedal box on the bulkhead gets in the way of a lot of things that used to come through. With mine, the heater innards have been turned over, so the heater core connections stick out of the other side, this means the two heater hoses come through the opposite side (by the bonnet stay) and the 'elephants trunk' comes through the other side too.

It's a lot of work for questionable gain. I'm living with mine as the car came like that, i'm not sure if i would ever do it myself.

Cheers for the reply Chris. I know a lot more now, and I don't think I would do it either just interested in why really.
Cheers again

I think part of the reason they were used is that back in the old days when Marinas were bangers that could be found in any breakers yard, people used to use Marina front brake discs and then a Marina back axle to have a common pcd. Once you've done those two, the Marina pedal box makes a lot of sense as you've transferred the whole system from the Marina and everything would be or should be nicely balanced.

Also, some Marina master cylinders were dual circuit meaning you'd still get some braking effort if there was a sudden pipe failure.

It would make less sense now as the Marinas and their spares can be difficult to get hold of. New servos are unobtainable or very expensive.

you can fit a tr6 servo to the marina pedal box