A little while ago my early-type brake pedal broke too.
In my opinion, the design of the early brake lever was inherently non-failsafe with the primary lever operating the master cylinder via a shaft and secondary lever.
It is the joint between this secondary lever and the shaft that fails. I am aware via this thread of one other pre Nov 2012 brake pedal failure (reported by Krazy Horse in May 2014). This failure appears to have been identical to mine.
One theory is that during the brake bleeding process, the pedal comes up against a hard stop at ‘end-of-travel’ - so does not have the cushioning effect of the hydraulic back pressure. A bit of excess pressure on the pedal in these circumstances is enough to break the joint between the secondary lever and the shaft that it’s attached to. In my opinion it points to the strength of these components being somewhat marginal.
I must express my thanks to MMC who were very proactive in getting the car fixed, transporting the vehicle to Malvern, installing the later style pedal box and all associated reservoirs & tubing. The costs of this were split (my part coming to around £500). My protestations that the failure was safety critical, known to MMC and therefore should have been addressed via a safety recall were ignored.
I thought long and hard about whether to go public with this. I have no interest in causing difficulties for MMC, however, in the end, I decided that I couldn’t live with myself if I subsequently heard that someone had been injured due to a similar pedal failure and I had not done my part to inform the community.
Looking at the owners register on TalkMorgan I estimate that there may have been up to 350 cars fitted with the early type pedal arrangement. We now know of two ‘sudden & catastrophic’ failures and MMC may be aware of more. Even 2 out of 350 is quite high statistically for such a safety critical component. This surely must warrant further action?
Knowing what I do now, I personally would not be happy to drive a car with the early pedal assembly.
[This post refers to the early type M3W pedal assembly which was fitted before November 2012 – the type with ‘M 3 W’ cut into the pedal levers. A redesigned pedal assembly was introduced from Nov 2012 and MMC inform me that there are no known failures of the later type.]
