Old brake hoses can result in the behavior you describe.
Have they been checked/replaced?

gary
'67 122S
'72 ES

I had that problem with Li'l Red. I'll try to insert the story here.

One Friday in 1979 in the Cherry Point Base Newspaper I saw a
1967 2-door 122s advertised. Since I had left my other 122S in
Panama and only had one car, I was tempted beyond my ability to
withstand. I found the place and looked over the car. It had an
unsightly fiberglass repair over the right front wheel and was
faded to a brick red. I negotiated with the owner, who couldn't
give me much info about the car other than to tell me it had new
brake disks recently installed, but still had braking problems.
"No sweat!" I told myself, "I can handle this!" I bought it for
$400 and he was RIGHT about the braking problems. It didn't
leak, but to stop you had to pump the brakes at least 3 times,
and bleeding didn't help. I finally observed considerable runout
of both disks so I took them off and took them to a machine shop
to check whether they were out of true. They were not. When
chucked in a lathe they ran perfectly true. (???) Would you
believe the HUBS were bent? I had the shop machine the disk
mounting face on the hubs, which reduced the runout from about
0.100" to about 0.015", still unacceptable, and finally shimmed
between the disks and the hubs with feeler stock to get them
within about 0.002" of true, which provided good braking.
--
George Downs, The "original" Walrus3, Bartlesville, Oklahoma

dv;

Do you really mean a soft pedal (time for bleeding!) or that the pedal needs two long excersions before it becomes nice and solid and good braking action results...because with 5-6 clicks of free travel before the rear shoes contact, (which is on the high side), I suggest you should adjust the rears a bit closer...I think you'll find that will help eliminate the free travel, and the E-brake will work at around 3-4 clicks.

The very effect you describe, is just the way I know that my rear shoes need adjusting, but usually, before I get an opportunity to climb under the rear and adjust, I just preload the E-brake a couple of clicks...remember the adjustor manualy spreads the bottom end of the shoes, and the E-brake spreads the top end...either way brings the shoes closer to the drum and therefore results in requiring less wheel cylinder/master cylinder action.

Cheers

Do you have the original Girling brake booster installed? Mine was leaking fine air bubbles into my braking system-and I couldn't really tell. No matter how much I bled I never had full pedal pressure. I lost ALL pressure when the thing finally gave in and shot fluid directly into my intake manifold.