There I was minding my own business when my old chum Clive Burnet, technical manager at Scania GB rang me up to ask me if I had any photographs of a rather different kind of brake test I conducted back in the mid '90s at the manufacturer's Swedish test track. At the time the jolly folk at Sodertalje had just launched the 4-Series and were keen to prove that its EBS/discs braking system was better than the old drum system. So off I went to the Scania test track where we did a at least a dozen full pressure brake stops, back-to-back, at 50mph to show how the discs kept working and the drums faded. In the end the EBS/disc-braked tractor was stopping well ahead of its drum-braked stablemate (as you can see from the photo here) and as if you need telling the yellow artic in the background has drum brakes....now click through here for more...
And here they are again showing their respective braking performances....as I recall we did it in three different versions----a) EBS discs on the tractor and trailer b) drums all round on tractor and trailer and c) an EBS/disc-braked tractor with a drum-braked trailer---the latter being the most obvious combination that a driver with a new EBS/disc-braked 4-Series tractor would encounter. Not surprisingly the results folowed the predicted pattern--the all-round disc unit stopped quickest, the disc-braked tractor and drum-braked trailer the second quickest and the drum-braked tractor/trailer last. The other thing I recall was being glad to standstill after doing more than 20 full pressure brakes stops from 50mph!. Meanwhile the reason why Clive called was that he was after a copy of the special phtograph we took of both tractors side-by-side----but with a line of people starting from the front of the disc-braked tractor and finshing at the front of the drum-braked unit which was around 5.0metres or further down the track...and on the basis of a picture being worth 1,000 words, the five people standing between the two tractors showed how effective disc-brakes were.....as these were the people the drum-braked combination would have hit! If I can dig it up I'll try and post it up...meanwhile the picture at the very top shows the two trucks without the people standing there!.
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