Break Brake

The brake parts I ordered came in. Discovered I ordered the wrong front EBC rotors, or perhaps it was a subconscious desiscion to upgrade? What happened is I ordered the later year ones, which are larger. The good thing is that if you order the same later year calipers, they bolt right up to the older hubs. The only thing is you need to either modify or remove the dust shields. I removing them is the easiest to do. Cut with Dremel and wrench it off.

So the right side went together nicely, no problems.

From this, to this!

And then the EBC “Green stuff” pads to load into the calipers:

So that done, I started working on the left side.

So far so good, get the old parts unbolted, put on new rotor and bolt on the caliper. I go to load the caliper and undo one of the caliper mount bolts. The caliper is supposed to swivel up to allow loading of the pads. WTH is going on here? After closer examination, there’s interference with the casting. I look at the other caliper, and see that there is a machined area. WTF? Why isn’t this one machined? Sheeze. You know of course things can never go perfect, always has to be snags somewhere. Anyway, nothing a bit of angle grinding won’t take care of.

 That solved that problem and the left side finally went together and was done. Called it a day for Sunday.

Monday, Presidents Day, get off to a lethargic start. Damn wine from last night. So here’s how the front looks with the wheel mounted. I should add that one of the consequences of doing this upgrade is that 13 inch rims will no longer fit. I’m a little bummed because I liked the old school 13″ Panasports I had for racing. My street wheels here are 14’s and you can see the clearance.

Anyway, I start on the back left brakes. Here’s the before. Mounted up the Brembo OEM replacement rotor that I painted the hat section in an attempt to retard rust. Bolt up the caliper. Then go to load the pads. Undo the lower bolt. Oh geeze, this doesn’t feel right. Pull the bolt out. F…. threads are all messed up. Hmm, these remans branded Centric parts are not having a good track record. The banjo bolt I snapped on the other side may have been due to some dirty threads, and now this bolt. Unbolt the caliper and pull it off. Sigh, more “machine work”. Chase the threads with tap, pull the OEM bolt from old caliper to replace the reman one. All good. Load up the caliper with matching EBC pads for the rears.

And here it is, all done!

Just got back from a test drive and some initial break/pad bedding in. I can already tell that there’s a huge difference, and it’ll just get better as they break in fully. Nice!