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Wilwood big brake setup


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Over the last few months I've been working on a major overhaul to the brakes of my Conquest. I have finally concluded the front brake setup as of today and will begin working on the rear system very soon.

 

This system uses Wilwood 12.72" diameter and 1.25" wide rotors. Due to the width of the rotor and the size of the caliper this setup will only fit a rear 8" or 9" wheel. I have yet to determine what width spacer would be required to fit the stock front 16x7 or 16x8 wheels. I suspect that if a 0.81" wide rotor is used, they may be able to fit with little or no spacers. I will check into this later.

 

The part numbers for the rotors, calipers and hats are:

Rotor: 160-2540 and 160-2541

Calipers: 120-11136

Hat: 170-7632

 

Both of these fit without any necessary modifications to the wheel hubs or the rotor hats. A number of the rotor hats Wilwood offers do not have a large enough centering hole so to find a hat with not only the right offset, but a centering hole that is perfect within 0.010" was to me the holy grail of brake parts. ;) I did, however, modify my wheel hub to use longer press-in wheel studs and drilled and tapped the hubs for rotor retention bolts, but both of these modifications are not 100% necessary.

 

Eventually I will post up the prints for the mounting brackets, but that will have to wait until I make my bracket for the other side of the car as I forgot to measure a few components before mounting everything up. So for now, enjoy the pictures.

 

Bigger rotors...

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood1.jpg

 

Bigger pads... It's safe to say this is all overkill for regular street tires.

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood2.jpg

 

Because these are two piece rotors, safety wire is absolutely mandatory for the retaining hardware. DO NOT forget this!

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood3.jpg

 

Drilled and tapped wheel hub for the rotor retention bolts.

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood11.jpg

 

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood12.jpg

 

The bracket is pretty simple. It is made from 3/8" steel plate and uses two spacers that are 0.44" thick. Each spacer has a flat ground into it for clearance with the strut housing. I ultimately chose to weld these spacers to the mounting plate as I wanted to ensure that the shear point for the bolt was as close to the caliper mounts as possible.

 

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood4.jpg

 

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood13.jpg

 

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood5.jpg

 

Because of the extreme width of the rotor and caliper, the caliper actually has to be mounted behind the factory location for everything to clear the wheel without a spacer. If the caliper and rotor was moved any closer towards the center of the car (if you were to try to make it clear 16x7 wheels), the rotor will begin to interfere with the lower ball joint of the strut.

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood6.jpg

 

Most of the hardware has to be shortened to fit flush with the mount as the rotor to mount clearance is only about 0.125".

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood7.jpg

 

Included with the D2 struts was a set of what appeared to be brake line holders. They didn't seem to fit anywhere in particular, but with a hole in the proper place and mount of the holder cut off, it works almost identically to the factory hardware.

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood9.jpg

 

Because race car. :)

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood8.jpg

 

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood10.jpg

 

Before:

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood14.jpg

 

After:

http://maxzillian.com/starion/wilwood15.jpg

 

And so, onto the prints! Now I will make it clear that these are for open distribution and not to be used for profit! Or at least if you do, help a pal out. ;)

 

http://maxzillian.com/starion/bigbrakes/caliper_mount.jpg

 

http://maxzillian.com/starion/bigbrakes/spacers.jpg

 

Left caliper mount:

http://maxzillian.com/starion/bigbrakes/caliper_mount_left.jpg

 

Right caliper mount:

http://maxzillian.com/starion/bigbrakes/caliper_mount_right.jpg

Edited by Maxzillian
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Mine technically aren't made anymore. What spawned this whole project was a purchase of four used calipers off eBay. :lol:

 

The current equivalent would be 120-11136

 

http://wilwood.com/Calipers/CaliperProd.aspx?itemno=120-11136

 

These are actually slightly narrower by about 0.375" total width.

Edited by Maxzillian
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I'm afraid I won't be in the business of fabricating mounts. I may have a band saw, drill press, and a lathe to help me fabricate these parts, but each bracket takes about 2 hours to make. You'll be able to find a local machine shop that can make the parts for you a lot cheaper than it'd cost for me to do it.
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I only need the plans and part numbers.. This should be a sticky.

 

X2

 

You doing the prints in Inventor? SolidWorks? If not I can go off your prints and see about having a single cast piece made and machined for the bracket. Would machining it out of a single block of aluminum be strong enough? Just picking your brain a bit.

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The stock front 7x16 front wheels won't fit without a spacer. I don't know about the 8x16 SHP wheels. The rear 8x16 TSI wheel, however, fits just fine.

 

The program I modeled in was a student copy of ProEngineer so the files won't be of any use to anyone. I will, however, be making 2D prints. The parts are very simple dimension wise so it shouldn't be a challenge at all to copy.

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Wilwood makes awesome brakes, I raced on them for a few years.

 

There is a guy called Revolution Brake that sells the Wilwood fronts as a kit, complete with the turn-key bracketry. They are very very nice. He used to road-race. He will sell uprated rotors, pads, whatever you want.

 

I found a guy on eBay that had a set of Wilwood brackets for the widebody starquest. I had to pay a pretty penny, but I have them now. I also have a full set of Wilwood brakes that are compatible with the Starquest brackets, the ones I raced on. Still in good shape (not the pads. ;) ) I'm going to mount them next week, most likely. I heartily recommended Wilwoods.

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I was designing a similar setup a few years ago and got sidetracked and havnt looked at it since. Your lighting a fire under my but now to get back into the starquest scene. I too like the idea of keeping within the factory size wheel, be it 8's 9's what ever. Awesome job, I always like reading about what you do to your car.
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Temporarily I'll be using the stock master cylinder, but eventually I'll be using a dual master cylinder setup with a balance bar. I haven't determined what bore size to use yet.
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Temporarily I'll be using the stock master cylinder, but eventually I'll be using a dual master cylinder setup with a balance bar. I haven't determined what bore size to use yet.

 

I just asked because I just read an article in Modified written by Mark Valskis at Brembo, regarding some big brakes actually losing braking power with a caliper change due to the volume of fluid in the pistons varying. They used the example of an STI that somebody had put huge Porsche brakes on, and just doing the swap resulted in a 30% loss of braking power over the stock setup. That was news to me, I didn't know it worked that way. Here's the link:

 

 

Modified BBK article

Edited by Fuze
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That's because in the example provided, the Subaru caliper has 30% more piston area than the Porsche caliper. This means that when comparing them using the same hydraulic pressure from the master cylinder, the Porsche caliper would have 30% less clamping force. To combat this the brake pedal pressure applied by the driver either needs to be increased or the bore size of the master cylinder needs to be decreased.

 

In this case the Conquest has a single piston measuring 2.25" diameter while the Wilwoods I am using have two 1.75" pistons (since there are two pairs opposing each other, we can only use two pistons for force calculations). This adds up to a total piston area of .99 square inches for the Conquest and 1.2 square inches for the Wilwoods. Or a gain of about 21%.

 

Then you factor in going from a 10.87" rotor to a 12.72" rotor which is another gain of 17% which makes a total system gain of 38% over stock. :)

 

Granted, I've found that in most cases that the stock brakes are more than adequate. However, for track events I found that the stock brakes could not handle the heat generated. By going to a larger rotor (thicker and larger in diameter) I am going to a system that is better at temporarily storing and displacing the heat generated by the brakes.

Edited by Maxzillian
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  • 2 weeks later...
You obviously have your homework done! I had just seen that article and though it might be of interest to ya, not saying your setup has any issues just in general. ;)
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  • 3 weeks later...

Prints have now been amended to the first post!

 

I've put about 400 miles on the setup so far and my initial impression is good. I did notice that I actually have additional pedal play (IE, softer and feels like air in the lines). I can't tell if there's still air in the calipers, the calipers are flexing, the cheap lines are flexing, or all of the above. Regardless, braking performance is good and it's impossible to detect any fade with these things, even when using the brakes to load the engine up before exiting a corner when combating turbo lag. ;)

 

Hopefully within the next couple months I'll have the rear brakes sorted and working!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Prices:

 

$160 each for the calipers

$200 each for the rotors

$134 each for the hats

 

Total $988.00 without pads. It's a ton of coin for brakes but if your tracking it, they are worth it. Oh, don't forget the pads!!! That with the D's will make a great suspension and brake package. Well done. Oh, BTW, these are retail prices from Wilwood's website. I don't know if you can get discounts through dealers or not. It might be worth finding out though.

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