I'll start with the brakes because this part of the project took the longest. Actually, over a year later, it's still not done, but you'll get the details at the bottom. The vendor who sold us the brakes will be referred to as the "supplier" since I don't believe in smearing anyone publicly without giving them a chance to make good on their promises.
It started with a simple desire to improve the braking of the car. The 308 had
very good brakes for a street car in 1983. 4 wheel vented discs combined with
4 piston cast iron calipers made for more than adequate stopping on the street
given 1983 tire technology. The downsides of keeping the stock braking system
are cost of stock replacement parts and difficulty of finding parts. Imagine
realizing 2 days before a track event that you have at best 1 day's worth of
brake pad left for a 2 day driving school. Ferrari pads don't grow on trees.
Stock front rotors are around $300 each. For $300 a rotor, I want a lot more
brake power. Now imagine adding 40HP and R compund tires. Throw in enough suspension
to make your instructor get motion sickness and now you have barely enough brake
to for your warmup lap. Suffering brake fade and ending up in a gravel pit on
your out lap is considered bad form. The last reason to upgrade your brakes:
17 inch wheels make the stock brakes look like a compact disc with a chip clip.
These were our brake options as best we could figure out:
1) 328 uprights and brakes
2) Brembo front brake kit
3) Front and rear brakes from a variety of Ferrari tuners out there
4) Design our own
Option 1, 328 parts, is supposedly an easy bolt on. The problem is that a switch
from fixed 4 piston calipers to floating single piston calipers is not so much
of an upgrade as a sidestep. At least the 328 stuff is slightly larger diameter
and a little thicker. The cost of used 328 uprights and calipers is a little
frightening considering the small increase in brake.
Option 2, a Brembo front kit, was nice because of the fit and finish of the
Brembo factory kits. Everything fits the first time. Spares for the Brembo kit
are expensive (over $300 a rotor) but available. The lack of a rear upgrade
made us nervous considering over 60% of the weight of the car is on the back
tires. One "tuner" told us the Brembo kit could be adapted to fit
the rear. Great. Spending $3300 on a brake kit only to let some crack smoking
17 year old hack it to pieces to make it fit on the rear of the car while giving
up the parking brake does not sound like getting your money's worth.
Option 3, a tuner kit, was the most expensive but would also have been the most
complete. Fronts and rears ready to bolt on. Rotor and pad availability varies
based on the rotors and calipers used. Sometimes, you don't even know what they
sell you so you are forced to purchase rotors through the tuner who sold you
the kit. Considering the pricing and shipping habits of some tuners, that could
mean an expensive disaster 2 days before a track event.
Option 4, brakes from scratch, had the most appeal. We could use catalog rotors,
hats, and calipers making replacements cheap and plentiful. Access to a machine
shop with a 3 axis CNC mill and a CNC lathe meant relatively easy bracket fabrication.
The problem was time. It would have taken a couple months of measuring, fitting,
trial, and error to perfect the brackets and brake lines. Little did we know
that the tuner kit would require all that work anyway.
In the end, we went with option 3, a tuner kit. It boiled down to the fact that
time was money and we didn't want to spend the whole summer building our own
stuff. Essentially money was no object because we had no time. We chose the
solution most likely to work in the least amount of time so money was no object.
Brakes were ordered and vast sums of money were spent (>$6000) so we started
disassembly in anticipation of braking nirvana. The car went up on jackstands
where it would stay for the good part of 2 months thanks to a variety of sources.
We started at the front and worked our way back. The front brakes were much
more of a hassle than they should have been because the front rotors would not
let go of the hubs. After some light prying then mild pounding, we broke out
the tech manual. I was convinced Ferrari would not use a unicast rotor (the
brake rotor hat serves as the hub, bearing races pressed into the center) but
suddenly we weren't so sure. The manual clearly showed the rotor as a distinctly
different part from the hub. We pried and pounded some more but got nowhere.
On day two, we removed the upright from the control arms to allow more leverage
and a more severe beating but nothing budged. We eventually removed the wheel
bearing nut and pulled the hub off the spindle which meant new dust seals inside
and out. A friend let us use the 50 ton hydraulic press at his shop. 12,000lbs
later, the rotor finally moved. Yes, that's 6 tons! The other side required
the same force. The last moron who worked on the car did not clean the hub face
or center when removing which allowed the rotor to do obscene oxidation things.
The lesson learned (which we already knew) was to thoroughly clean the hub and
rotor hat then apply a thin coat of anti-sieze to prevent things from sticking.
The rear brakes went just as smoothly. One side came off a ltittle too easily.
I noticed that one of the caliper bolts was turning too easily. At first I thought
it had worked loose but was wrong. Ferrari went to the expense of putting helicoils
in the cast aluminum uprights to increase the strength of the caliper bolt area.
Too bad some gorilla overtorqued the bolt and BROKE the mounting ear. Fantastic...
we were faced with finding a used upright to replace the broken one. Of course,
a used upright does not come with the stub axle which means pressing in NEW
bearings because the old bearings are destroyed when removing them and the stub
axle from the broken upright. It took a third person to point out that the left
and right uprights are identical. The factory only tapped and helicoiled the
appropriate side for the brake caliper. Back to the machine shop where the toolmaker
earned another favor by accurately measuring, drilling, and tapping for a helicoil
on the other side of both uprights. Somehow he was able to measure, indicate,
and machine a spotface and the appropriate tapped hole in the upright while
it was still full of bearing, stub axle, and hub which saved us the cost of
bearings and seals. Toolmakers are good people to know! We even put in the appropriate
Helicoil just like the factory did. All of a sudden, things looked good again.
Somewhere along the disassembly process, the brakes arrived. For the front,
we got billet 4 piston calipers, 12.7"x1.25" floating rotors on aluminum
hats, stainless braided brakelines, a machined adapter bracket, and a spacer
that fit between the rotor hat and the hub. For the back, 4 piston aluminum
calipers, 12.7"x.81" rotors on aluminum hats, stainless lines, and
adapter brackets. There were also some high strength metric bolts included with
the kit. We also ordered an adjustable proportioning valve with appropriate
fittings because we wanted the ability to fine tune the brake bias at the track.
The proportioning valve went in easily and exactly as described. That's the
best thing we can say about the brake experience.
I'll describe in detail what the components were and the approximate retail
prices are based on a quick search of the internet and some guesstimates on
my part. I have worked around milling and turning machines for a while so I
think I can safely guess costs.
Front calipers: Wilwood Billet Superlite II, about $180 each
Rear calipers: Wilwood Dynalites, $120 each
Front rotors: Perhaps Wilwood heavy Duty 48 curved vane vented, $100 each
Floating rotor conversion: $20 in hardware per rotor
Rear rotors: Wilwood ultralight 32 vane vented, $50 each
Front hat: catalog Wilwood hat with Ferrari wheel bolt mattern milled in it,
$100 plus $40 in machine shop work
Rear Hat: Wilwood hat with Ferrari bolt pattern machined in it, $100 plus $40
in machine work
Rear hat spacer: a small ring to reduce the inner diameter of the hat to match
the hub snout diameter, $25 each at a machine shop
Front spacer: Because Wilwood has no hat in its catalog in the appropriate offset,
a spacer was used between the hat and the hub. The side benefit of this spacer
is that it makes up the difference in thickness between the factor rotor hat
and the Wilwood hat, $75 each at a machine shop.
Front caliper adapter bracket: A VERY roughly machined piece of aluminum, $75
each at a machine shop
Rear bracket: Roughly machined piece of aluminum, $50 each at a machine shop
Front and rear stainless lines: Custom from Precise Lines, a less than reputable
brake line manufacturer, $150 per 4 piece set because of the low volume. For
reference, 6 line set for a BMW runs about $75.
Front and rear pads: Wilwood pads are about $50 per axle
Assorted metric bolts: $10
Tilton adjustable lever-style proportioning valve: $68
Assorted fitting for prop valve: $20
The total is $2298 so far and keep in mind that the Wilwood prices are what
Joe Ferrari enthusiast can order them for, not wholesale prices. Of course,
the shop is entitled to legitimate engineering costs because they had to prototype
the brakes and fine tune the fit. But, it would also be reasonable to pro-rate
the costs over the first few kits. 40 hours at $75 per hour is $3000 divided
across the first 4 kits is $750 an hour. There is also the overhead of ordering,
inventory, talking to the guy on the phone for 3 or 4 hours over several weeks,
beer for the fridge, paying the crack smoking kids in the shop, and the legitimate
costs of running a shop. I'll guess 30%. Now we are up to ($2298 + $750)*1.30
which equals $3962.40. Sure is a long way from $6200 that we paid. This is why
these places don't tell you what you are getting. We paid an extra $2200. You
would think that the money was well spent because surely they must have spent
all that extra money perfecting the brakes.
The first problem we noticed was that the spacer for the front hat had a small
lip that protruded past the face of the hat and interfered with the wheel. We
called the supplier and were informed that the brakes fit on his car so there
must be something wrong with our wheels. We told the supplier that we had ordered
aftermarket 17" wheels from wheel house X (name withheld because they screwed
us too). He was confused because he uses wheels from the same place. He offered
the possibility that the wheel supplier screwed up and used the wrong center
section because his wheels have a small counterbore which cleared the lip in
question. We pointed out that the stock brakes did not have such a lip and therefor
these brakes should not have the offending lip either. The supplier still was
not convinced and offered no resolution so we took matteres into our own hands.
Quickly flipping through the yellow pages, we found a local machine shop to
machine off the lip on both spacers for about $40 since my toolmaker friend
was too far away. Problem solved.
The next problem was with the front caliper brackets. The were the wrong thickness.
They were so far off that the calipers could not be bolted up to the brackets
on the uprights with the rotors in place. Unfortunately, they were not off in
the direction that could be shimmed. They had to be machined. Also they were
uneven: one end of the caliper was more inboard that the other. More machining
was required. We started on the back of the car to take our minds off the disaster
up front.
The rear brakes were just as interesting. We had the same alignment problems
as up front. Since the caliper brackets were about 1/4" thick, we decided
to mill a little off the caliper mounting ears. Keep in mind that no caliper
manufacturer in the world permits modifying the calipers. I'm a firm believer
that the manufacturer put all that metal there for a reason, but we had a track
event to get to. The calipers went off to the local machinist and for a small
fee, he shaved off what we thought was necessary. Upon re-assembly, we discovered
that the tapped holes in the brackets were not perpendicular to the bracket
itself. So we reamed out the caliper mounting holes slightly to clear the crooked
bolts. The suppliers response to our problems was that there couldn't be anything
wrong with the parts. "I can run a Bridgeport and I know when something
is not square," I told him but he was not sympathetic. We then discovered
that a certain bolt in the rear caliper bracket was hitting the rotor. After
carefully weighing our options, we ground a few threads off the end of the bolt.
After much machining and grinding of the front and rear caliper brackets, we
finally were able to bolt up the calipers with the rotors on the car. Sadly,
we discovered that 3 out of 4 calipers were too close the the spindle or stub
axle centerline as the rotor was rubbing the calipers and bridgebolts in several
locations. At this point, we suspected that the brackets were made in a drill
press instead of a 70 year old clapped-out Bridgeport. We pulled the brakes
off the car again (for the 4th time?) and started hogging out the brackets to
slot the holes in an attempt to make the calipers clear the outside edges of
the rotors. We reinstalled the brakes again to find that the rotors cleared
the calipers just enough to allow turning of the rotors by hand. Great.... They
will self-clearance themselves while we work on the rest of the car (suspension,
programmable engine management, etc.). Of course the rear brake line that was
a little taut at full suspension droop because it was too short worried me.
In the end, the brakes worked well enough to drive the car to the dyno for tuning.
A few days later, since we had missed the track event, the car went back on
jack stands and the brakes went back to the supplier so he could take a look
at the parts. I was very glad to see them off the car since I was worried mainly
about all the slotting we had done. There was nothing from keeping the calipers
from walking back into the rotor except friction between bolt heads and the
caliper brackets. We reinstalled the stock brakes for the 3rd or 4th time.
Several weeks later, the "re-worked" brakes arrived at the front door.
The supplier just turned down the OD of the rotors on a lathe to clear the calipers.
Not only did the kit come with unknown rotors, but they have to be machined
before installation. I'm sure 3 out of 4 drivers at a driver school bring a
small lathe with them to the track. The supplier finally admitted that something
was wrong and offered us a "good deal" on swaybars to make up for
the hassle.
So thats where we are, over 12 months later. The supplier refuses to resolve
our problems to our satisfaction. I have taken so many measurements on the car,
I'm seriously considering option 4, especially since learning to program the
CNC equipment at work.
Back to the Team DFL Ferrari Page
Ed 6/18/01