Reply to "Rear brakes"

quote:

Originally posted by David_Nunn:
icole, how many holes are there in each rear caliper adapter bracket? Obviously, there should be four; two unthreaded holes, to bolt the bracket to the upright and two threaded holes, to bolt the caliper to the bracket. If one of these holes (or bolts) is missing, DON'T DRIVE THE CAR! Something is VERY wrong. If you don't know much about brakes, find someone who does, to help you.

Although this is the first car that I have done this much work on I am a mechanical engineer. My dad fitted the brakes, and they are definitly not pantera specific. THe front are sound, but the rear bracket has 3 holes not 4. It has on threaded hole and two non threaded. It uses one long bolt through the bracket to hold the caliper in place directly to the original mounting hole, and the other side of the caliper is helt to the bracket. The bracket is held in place by a third bolt. It is strong enough, but the front low side of the caliper had 1mm clearance with the disc, and that was after the caliper was ground down about 1mm. It was fine for light braking, but under hard braking there was enough flex that the caliper still hit the disc. I have switched the left mounting bracket to the right and vise versa. Now the caliper sits an inch lower toward the ground, and the trailing edge has the clearance issue. right now it is touching, so I am going to grind that edge 1mm like my dad did. The bolt pattern on the new caliper is to small to fabricate a bracket with 4 wholes as you have described. Now when I brake hard the caliper will flex away from the disc instead of into it. The front calipers are held on by a 4 whole bracket. If my solution doesn't work, then I will need new calipers anyway, and in an emergency I can stop with E-brake and front brakes only. I'm not racing or canyon carving. I'm putting around suburbia.