Brake caliper sourcing mess

"kanadanmajava1" (kanadanmajava1) 08/23/2016 at 07:00 • Filed to: None

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I have two projects that need brake caliper updating. Charger doesn’t even have brake calipers yet as it came with drum brakes. My BTCC replica Vectra has puny disc brakes and a lot bigger will be needed in the future. The brakes were already at their limit when I was driving the car on track with very slippery 14 year old tires. The Charger is progressing slowly so I’m just collecting parts and doing more to get the Vectra move faster.

I bought huge Brembo brake calipers from a Citroën C8 with a V6 engine. They use 310x32 mm brake discs with a very large 4 piston calipers. The calipers are radial mounted so the adapter are quite easy to make. The same caliper has been used in various purposes so race spec brake pads are available. Mine don’t look as nice as the one in the picture.

I would like to use a disc size that come from some production vehicle. If I later want to change to use rotors with separate bells I can build ones that use same dimensions.

I have now switched my plans. I want to get a bit larger diameter discs even though the thickness might drop. I decided to get calipers from a Alfa Romeo 159/Brera with large engines. They are quite similar with the earlier purchases and they even use the same pad size. They are designed to use 330x28 mm brake discs and these discs will fit directly over Vectra’s hubs and they have the same bolt pattern and the center hole.

The main differences in these calipers are that they use unequal sized pistons and monobloc design. The piston areas with the Vectra’s original calipers and with the two Brembo calipers are nearly equal. So there no need to switch the master cylinder (the rear brake line has already a bias regulator).

So I purchased a set that has 159 Brembo calipers and also rear calipers that have hand brake function using the disc. Vectra uses a separate drum for the hand brake. Upgrading the rear brakes isn’t very essential at this point but maybe in some later phase I will upgrade them too.

While I was waiting the calipers to be delivered I noticed that I had misread the sizing tables and the rear caliper were for solid discs and not for the slightly thicker ventilated ones.

When the package arrived I noticed that I had made another mistake. The front calipers were also the wrong ones. For some reason Alfa Romeo had offered Brembo calipers in one certain model that did use 4 piston monobloc calipers but with smaller brake discs (shared with the low spec models). So they are suitable for 305x28 mm brake discs and not the big ones that I’m going to use. I had missed this weird option.

So now I have one useless set of semi large calipers. The front ones look like these:

The big brother looks like this (the external brake line and the location of bleeding screws should have been good ways to spot my mistake):

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > kanadanmajava1 08/23/2016 at 09:52

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A shame, I must say, that there isn’t an option like Scarebird Classic Brakes to have done all the figuring out for you. This option (with the four-piston calipers) allows properly powerful brakes, but so much fiddlyness to get right... My Falcon/Ranchero front drums were a very easy swap - two GM a-body calipers, two Toyota discs, and a mix of other stray parts later it was all assembled.

kanadanmajava1 > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 08/23/2016 at 10:52

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Figuring out the useful parts would pretty easy if the dimensions of them would be available somewhere. A lot of factory brake stuff can actually be bolted together if you just know what to use. And then you just have to find the parts.

My plan was good but my mistake was not to thoroughly check what was I actually buying. I got blinded by the title “Alfa Romeo 159 Estate Big Brake Brembo kit” and didn’t realize that “small Brembo kit” would have been more correct title for those.

Here are the dimensions for the 159 disc that I will be using.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > kanadanmajava1 08/23/2016 at 10:58

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I have the fantasy of a sizing book for brake discs and other parts, listing thickness, offset, inner diameter, outer diameter, and bolt pattern -if only discs were sold like industrial parts. Of course, back in the ‘20s and even the ‘30s a lot of small manufacturers sourced from industrial suppliers for common parts like that, and for some parts it has continued at least into the ‘70s if not the modern age, but it’s no longer the case so much as it was.

kanadanmajava1 > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 08/23/2016 at 11:24

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That would be very useful.

I have been planning something similar for exhaust/intake flanges, bellhousings, flywheels etc. For some reason finding these as accurate diagrams is nearly impossible if we are talking about something more exotic than an SBC.

A portable CNC probing device could a solution. The other option would be to use a digital camera and some kind of photo processing to transform the image into an accurate diagram. I know that textile designers use similar methods and I’m thinking about testing their software.

The scaling is some kind of problem. A t-shirt that is 0.6% too big wouldn’t cause problems but a bellhousing pattern would need to quite accurate to work.

MILANKAJGANIC > kanadanmajava1 11/15/2016 at 22:05

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hallo

l need c8 v6 brembo calipers as l have that car and l have peugeot 607 brembos

can we swap.

THANX

kanadanmajava1 > MILANKAJGANIC 11/16/2016 at 05:36

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Hi! If I remember correctly the 607 caliper are normal lug mounted calipers. I might have problems using those but some dimensions might help me to know.

My current plan is to use the larger 159 calipers in the Vectra project but I haven’t finally decided what to do with the other sets. The larger ones would be better as I can get various brake pads for those but with the smaller ones I might be able to use 15" wheels. I was planning to keep both until I reach the front suspension building for the Charger.

Are your old calipers broken or are you upgrading the brakes?

Here’s a Brembo family photo of the calipers that I have now. The 809/C8 calipers are the middle ones. One has been refurbished (by Budweg?) and it is not black anymore. The pistons look also a bit different in that one. They came from a parts seller from Denmark.

MILANKAJGANIC > kanadanmajava1 02/08/2017 at 09:46

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607 brembos are fine low miles on the car lady get rear ended by trash truck.

Proracing > kanadanmajava1 09/06/2017 at 16:44

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Hello did you sell the c8 calipers?

kanadanmajava1 > Proracing 09/07/2017 at 10:33

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No, I still have them. Contact me by email: kanadanmajava(ät]gmail[dot)com