I had planned to spend most of today sorting out the build, but as ever things didn’t seem to go to plan, but nevermind! This evening however I got down to sorting out the brakes. First of all I assembled both drivers side bells and disks. As I have said before these are AP brakes off of the F3 cars of last year, but I happen to know they have not massively changed, and I think that Jon is now using these on his latest creation! The disks themselves ‘float’ on the bells to help prevent pad knockoff. The amount of float is up to you really, and AP now will sell you bobbins will different amounts, whereas before you had to make your own! Anyway, I have gone for a medium amount.
Fortunately for me I have done a few of these before and so they flew together. It can be pain to maintain float when assembling them, but it is important to maintain float whilst assembling. Some people say you can just tap it with a mallet at the end, which you can do to free them off but it certainly not the best way to do it. I tend to put three bobbins in at about 120 degrees first. If float is lost I find the best thing to do is to turn both the nut and the bolt the same direction, hence not tightening or loosening, one way or the other! But I suppose whatever you find works best for you really!
The bells are then bolted onto the back of the wheel flange and then the whole lot is bolted back onto the axle. The caliper is then mounted, with the pads already in, as with these calipers you have to put the pads in from ‘inside’ if you understand me?! I don’t actually have any M10 bolts so I had to borrow a couple from stores, so you can see in the pic below there are only two bolts holding on the bell!
Here is the front corner all assembled up, apart from the steering which I took off for some spurious reason, so I had to hold it in the right position!
I thought I would put in this picture as i thought it looked pretty cool! If you look from the outside you cannot even see any of the caliper, all you can see is disk filling the centre! You can also see this in the picture above. I just thought this pic, taken at an angle, showed the bad boy brakes in all their beauty!
