I have a '69 dart with 9" drums in front and rear. They brake, but I am not satisfied with that for dealing with LA traffic on a daily basis. Right now sometimes they are pretty firm and sometimes I go close to the floor to brake. That would be fine for now if I didn't have to deal with jerkoffs jumping into the space I leave for braking. I am considering adding a power brake booster set up to help for the time being, but I have also heard that it adds problems to the idleing?

I went to Napa to order one, but the only one they had was toast and they couldn't even rebuild it. I looked up Rock Auto.com and there are different part #'s for drum and disc. I am currently gathering the various parts needed for the conversion (and I am not asking about that because there is enough info about that on previous threads, thank you) but the one part that there isn't too much for or against is whether or not adding a power brake booster is really beneficial in either instance for drums or discs.

Soo, I guess that is my question...is the power brake booster worth spending the extra time and bucks? For those who have added it, was it on drum or disc and did it really help?

thanks, the mrs[/i]

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anything worth doing is worth re-doing, again and again and again...........

For your situation I don't think its worth it because you will be upgrading to discs later. A booster doesn't alter how well a car brakes, it just gives an easier pedal feel.

I think once you upgrade to discs with no booster you will be plenty happy with the improvement. Do that first, then decide if you want to add a boster. Remember you can tweak pedal feel by using different bore master cylinders as well (smaller bore = more pedal travel but a softer pedal, larger bore = less travel but stiffer pedal)

Remember when adding a booster you will need different hardlines between the master cylinder and distribution block because the master cylinder will be pushed forward more.

If the booster is leaking, you will create a vaccum leak, and that can affect idle. But if everything is intact you should be fine. As long as your engine has good vaccum at idle your set.

I believe the difference between the drum and disc boosters are that the drum version is bigger, but don't quote me on that. Check out partsamerica.com too as well (aka kragen), they have pictures on there for comparison.

As far as I know the booster is the same for both disc and drums. The master cylinder is of course different..