The Mite
Part 6
Rear Brakes
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I pulled the entire rear axle off the car and the rear brakes were toast. I needed new wheel cylinders, shoes, drums and hardware. Instead of fixing the drum brakes, I decided to upgrade the brakes to rear discs. There did not seem to be any available and cost effective rear kits from any of the vendors, so I decided to make my own rear kit for my wire-wheeled car. This is the pile of rear axle parts. |
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Here's the hub on the axle. The first thing that I had to do was make some measurements of the axle with the splined hub that holds the wire wheel, the wheel to hub clearance and hub diameter. Armed with these figures, I hit the local U-pullit junkyard in search of a car that had rotors that matched my specs. |
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And I found them! After much searching, a mid-80's Honda Prelude had rotors that were almost perfect. They would fit within the wire wheels and allow for clearance of the caliper, and they had almost a perfect fit onto the splined hub. The center hole needed to be opened up a few tenths on the lathe, and then the rotor dropped right onto the hub. The bolt holes even lined up! These are new rotors in the pictures, but I started all the fitting with a used one I picked up at the junkyard. |
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Here's how the rotor fits on the splined wire wheel hub. |
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Now for the calipers. I had originally thought about using Wilwood calipers, but decided to utilize the calipers from the same Prelude I got the rotors from. They have provisions for a parking brake. All I needed was a bracket to weld onto the rear axle to hold the calipers. Here's a cardboard cutout of the bracket. A little trimming and the design was transferred to steel and cut out with the Plasma cutter. |
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Here's the bracket cut and welded to the rear end. Once it's ground down a little and painted, it should look almost factory. |
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This is how the brake caliper and hub assembly looks when put together. |
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Here's another view of the brakes |
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And the back view. I still have to figure out how to actuate the parking brake, and there are some clearance issues with the inner wheel well that have to be taken care of before the car can be run. |