Ovlov brakes (was Jag brakes)

[Luis Marques <marques@rtis.ray.com>]

Ovlov's's may not be the most inspiring cars to drive, but they do have
some great brakes.  They have a "dual-triangle" brake system where each
of the two pistons in the dual-piston front caliper has it's own brake
line and is completely isolated from the other.  Each piston of the
master cylinder supplies pressure to one piston on each calipers, plus
one of the rear single-piston calipers (hence the "triangular braking") 
for two completely independent, redundant brake systems!  A great safety
feature. It looks something like this:

    RR      LR
     |\    /|
     | \  / |
     |  \/  |
     |  /\  |
     | /  \ |
     |/    \| 
    RF======LF

So even if you have complete failure of one of the circuits, you still
have equal braking power in each front wheel, plus partial braking on
one rear wheel.  Maybe somebody like IPD did offer a Brembo kit for
these cars, but AFAIK they had either ATE or Girling brakes from the
factory like most european cars. HTH

Luis Marques
'87 4kcsq


Bryan Carter <Rosso75@aol.com> wrote:
> 
> For what it's worth (which may be nothing), I have an '83 Volvo turbo
> wagon that I had to do a brake job on recently....most impressive
> brakes I've seen in a long time.  It's got 4 wheel disc and the fronts
> are huge, 4 piston Brembo's (as I recall) with two fluid lines.  I
> don't know if the base models had the same brakes, and I doubt they
> did, but there are plenty of Volvos out there to be raided for parts,
> and I don't think anyone could argue against Volvo or Brembo's
> reliability.