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I wish I could say that what I wrote in my last article was a test for all of you to see if you could find the mistake in my thinking. But it wasn’t. It was plain stupidity on my part. When I sent out my calipers to Goldline Brakes in Seattle the owner called me with a problem. While disassembling them he stripped the thread on one side of the return tube on my left front caliper. He said that sometimes these are installed too tight at the factory. Since I have never tampered with these I was inclined to believe him. With that being said his suggestion was to flip the return tubes to the other side of the caliper and use a bleeder screw repair kit on the stripped hole. In order to make this work he said that I could flip the calipers from left to right and vice versa. He seemed more concerned with the pad retaining clip flipping in the wrong direction. Since I had never really done a close examination of the caliper and the pistons it seemed that his solution sounded better than buying a new caliper for $510. As far as I knew the pistons were the same on all 4 calipers. It never occurred to me that they weren’t. They took the same pads. Well, anyway I consented to have him fix the caliper his way; after all he was the expert. When I got the calipers back I was quite impressed with the quality of workmanship. Now as I mentioned in my last article I was planning on using the rear calipers in the front and put the reversed calipers in the rear. Again I never looked at the piston size of either front or rears. My plan would not work. Not any of it. When did all of this become clear? I went to Jerry Pellegrino’s shop to bring some vinyl and I brought the fixed caliper to show him. His first reaction was never use a bleeder valve repair kit on a racecar’s caliper. Apparently they are acceptable on street cars but not racecars. Someone we know did and ended up having a significant crash when the caliper failed (the repaired valve was blown out). According to Jerry, a race caliper can see pressure of 1200 psi during threshold braking and that most repair services only test them to the limit of their air compressor (nowhere near 1200 psi). The other thing he mentioned was (of course) the piston size in the front caliper are not only much bigger than the rears but the front piston in the front calipers is larger than the rear piston. This is why the directional arrow is on the side of the caliper. The larger piston is the leading piston and the caliper would not work backwards. So now what do I do? Well, I throw the front calipers away (at least the Left one). I can fix the right one and have it as a spare in the trailer. Fortunately I have the original front calipers off of the turbo when I bought it (I had my 1990 S2 calipers on the car). I plan to get these over to Jerry at EPE to redo the seals and boots. The rears that Goldline did are OK to use so Jerry will just do the new fronts. Unfortunately I lost the $400+ for the work but I sent him a good email. It didn’t persuade him to refund the money though. So that was the first bonehead thing I did in 2005 and probably not my last. On another note… was the 24 hours of Daytona boring or what. I don’t know what happened but with all of the stupid crashes under caution and the absence of the Porsche GT3RS’s it just wasn’t interesting this year. Even the track seemed boring. Every once in a while you would see a Corvette, BMW, I think I saw a Viper, and a few other including the new GTO but the main focus of the show was the Daytona prototypes. Heck even Kevin Buckler has one now. And where did he get the support to enter 8 cars? I don’t know, I guess I have to wait for Le Mans. |
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