What material should I be looking at? Would aluminum hold up?
Also: if the mount type is listed as lug does this mean it just uses a bolt?
Frame of reference: Im wanting to adapt some wilwood calipers to my Z and will need to make mounting brackets/adapters.
Lots of big brake kits use aluminum caliper brackets, dunno what alloy though. There seems to be some debate on whether it's better to use heli-coil-style thread inserts or just tap the aluminum.
A "lug" mount caliper is two bolts that run parallel to the axle, as distinct from a radial mount. Radial mount the bolts are parallel to the longitudinal axis of the car, and theoretically offer a stiffer mount. It's unclear if that theoretical stiffness advantage is actually relevant if you're just going to adapt it to lug-style mounts on the hub, though.
Wilwood has drawings of their caliper on their website. And aluminum seems to do the job just fine.
Time to break out the ruler it seems.
Well, the caliper itself is aluminum...
In reply to Knurled:
And?
Its easiest to mock up with wood or steel. I like steel plate and stacks of washers until I get them right. Then I take the steel mockup to my machinist buddy along with the strut, rotor, and caliper. Then he works his magic and makes them out of aluminum.
Aluminum works fine - but steel is easier to attach to steel.
I would say it depends. If it's relatively thin, use steel, but if it's fairly thick, aluminum should be good.
When I mounted a set of Wilwood caliper to a Ford 8.8 rear I modified a set of caliper brackets from a Turbo TBird. I had to add some metal to the bracket to give me enough "meat" to make the lugs to mount the caliper. Steel is easier as any welder will work. Aluminum is lighter but you need a TIG to weld it. I have done a number of brake up grades on the front of some Lemons race cars. In most cases I just hack off the stock mounting lugs and weld on new ones positioned in the correct location for the bigger calipers and rotors.
Not one failure and a couple of wins so far.
If the Wilwood calipers are the same design as the GM Metrics, you can buy pre-made weld-on steel caliper brackets from Summit for around $14 each. We did this to put GM Metrics on a Ford 9" rear, with Impala SS rotors (5 x 5 bolt pattern).
Right now Im looking at having adapters machined out of aluminum. Would prefer to not weld anything if at all possible.
Another question: if the rotors im lokking at using are 30mm thick (1.181in) can I use a caliper that is setup for a 1.250in rotor?
In reply to Fitzauto:
"Probably". That's only about 35 thousands thinner on each side of the caliper. As long as you don't run your pads down to the metal the caliper pistons likely will stay in their bores. If you're really concerned, some places sell brake pad spacer shims for just this purpose. If it were my car, my level of worry on that would be somewhere between the air in the tires being too humid and the transmission fluid being too red.
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