Master Cylinder Heat Shield

By: Bob Goodson
May 24, 2020

The stock car came with a nice stamped steel heat shield to protect the master cylinder and reservoirs from exhaust manifold heat.   You can see it above in this picture of the engine in the Corolla I used to race.

While the red car has a ceramic coated header on it — which helps – I still wanted to shield the M/C.  Unfortunately, finding a used OEM piece proved impossible.  So I set about fabricating one.  Started with a piece of relatively light sheet steel.  I’d have preferred aluminum (reduced mass = less re-radiation), but we’re deep in the middle of isolating from the Coronavirus crap and I don’t have any sheet aluminum big enough in my pile of parts.  I was really happy with the bend – used my 5″ bench vise brake – and just worked the piece from side to side bending a bit as I alternated.  Came out perfect – and I got the angle right on the first try!

There’s a captured nut on a small bracket on top of the booster — I figured I’d use it along with the master cylinder retaining nut on the same side to attach the shield.  Made a few bracket pieces out of the same sheet metal.  And used the brake to bend the brackets.

You can see here, I temporarily riveted one bracket to the other, bolted it to the booster/master and then used a C-clamp to position the shield during mock up.
 

Once happy with the positioning, I tacked welded it.

Then, weld ‘er up, a bit of clean up grinding (I weld just enough to be dangerous), sand, clean, paint with hi temp paint.  Perhaps I’ll redo in sheet aluminum in the future, match the catch can brackets.
 

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