Brake question, no flames plz

To be honest with you I wouldn't bother with the rear brakes. 80%+ of your stopping power comes from the front brakes. If you do the rear I recomend converting to disc. As far as the front goes just go with a good set of calipers (like a 2 piston setup) some sloted/crossdrilled rotors and some metallic or ceramic pads. Remember for some calipers may have to go with a bigger rim diameter than a 16" so do some research before you buy anything. Also I recomend steel brake lines if you go that far.

Hope it helps.

Yeah it's pretty straight foreward. Just bleed the brakes when you get done. Also look into getting larger rotors. I don't know what size stock is but I bet you could fit 13" rotors underneath those 17's w/o any problems. Check this site out

http://www.baer.com/Support/Templates.aspx


You can print out a template to make sure everything will work BEFORE you buy it. I know it is for Bear...not very budget friendly but it will give you a good starting point. That and there's some good tech stuff there.

Hope it helps.

with braided steel brake lines and a good set of brake pads you will feel all the difference in the world. old worn out lines will bulge and give a little with pressure. also, if you want to switch to disk brakes in the back but want to keep your 4 lug rims, check out the 88 thunderbird turbo coupe. i dont know the website or anything, but do a search for it and it all bolts right up and i think it all costs less than 200 bucks.

Front & rear brake upgrade? Want 3.55 or 3.73 gears while you are at it?

Auto trans Turbo Coupes come with 3.73 gears and manual Turbo Coupes come with 3.55 gears. I choose 3.55 since I do more highway driving. Both ratios have 10.5 disk brakes with vented rotors as standard equipment.

It takes 2 guys the first day to get the old rear end out and the new one bolted in place. It takes 1 guy another whole day to do the brakes.

You will need a several sets of fittings, I recommend that you get them from Matt90GT's website, http://www.svo73mm.cjb.net/. Read Matt's instructions thoroughly, everything you need to know about the brakes is all there. You need to be patient and follow all the internal links, and there are many of them. You will need 2 fittings in the rear to adapt your old brake tubing to the TC disk brakes. The fittings go between the steel tube and the caliper brake hose. You will need another set of fittings to make a 2 port to 3 port adapter. To make life simpler, just buy the kits from Matt. You could piece them together, but it's not worth the time unless you work at an auto parts store with all the fittings ever made.

You will need to drill the quad shock mounting holes 2” below the holes drilled for the Turbo Coupe mounting points. The bolts are metric, so don’t loose them or the nuts. A 15/32” drill should be about the right size unless you have access to metric sized drill bits. Going without quad shocks is not an option unless you have aftermarket parts to soak up the wheel hop.

You will need a proportioning valve, Summit has one for $40 + shipping.
You will need a kit (FMS makes the part) to gut the stock proportioning valve, Summit also has that, about $10.


You will need a new master cylinder, see Matt's site and make you choice. I used a 94-95 Mustang master cylinder. Note that rebuilt 94-95 Mustang master cylinders do not come with a reservoir. That means a trip to the junkyard and some more money spent.

Your brake pedal may be very hard and almost impossible to lock up the brakes. I had to replace the front calipers with 73 mm calipers from a 91 Lincoln Mark 8 to get the braking performance up to par.

Bleeding the brakes will require 2 people and some coordinated effort. I don’t recommend using you wife or girlfriend to pump the pedal – they get offended when you yell at them. I used a homemade power brake bleeder constructed from a garden sprayer and some fittings from Home Depot. It cost about $25 and was worth every penny.

See http://www.mustangcentral.net/tech/brake.html for help with the emergency brake - the stock setup tends to lock up and not release properly.

All in all I have been very pleased with the results.