MC stroke length question

[Mean 69]

6:1 is a good ratio for manual brakes, less than this will require using a smaller bore master cylinder such that enough line pressure is generated to squish down the calipers, which is not terrible, except that is comes with the nasty increase in pedal travel (which is in part negated by the decrease in pedal travel from the ratio).

John, I'd agree with Matt in setting things up, allowing full pedal travel. It is not that big of a deal to adjust later if the pedal is too high, for instance, AND YOU HAVE THOROUGHLY CHARACTERIZED YOUR BRAKES! I have been battling with manual brakes for a while now, and now that I have a pretty darned nice pedal feel, my car is experiencing pad knockback in hard turns, which requires pumping the pedal up a couple times to get the pistons back where I need them. The only reason I bring that up, is to emphasize the comments to allow full pedal travel until you are supremely confident you don't need it.

Don't worry too much about damaging an M/C if you push it down too far, if you do this, with brakes installed in the car, and bled, you have far more important things to deal with than fear of hurting the M/C.

On the stroke length deal, 1.1" should be fine if the bore size of the individual cylinders is matched to the calipers. When you start to bleed things out, etc, start with a 50/50% front-rear bias on the balance bar, this is important. If your M/C's are sized correctly, you shouldn't be too far off of this in the end, if you need to push the bias bar too far one way or the other, replace the offending M/C with the correct bore for that end of the car.

One more critical thing, when the pedal is relaxed, make sure it really is. The piston needs to come back fully to its home position in order to "open" the port back to the fluid reservoir. On a custom deal like yours, you'll undoubtedly need to setup a brake actuation switch, so make certain it doesn't restrict the rearward motion/rest position of the pedal. Critical.

The only thing more important on a car than the brakes is, of course, the tires.

Mark