You may have seen this post on T'Bricks. I have been testing the big brake kit on my converted 700 series, a 200 series kit will be available at a future date.

These kits will use Wilwood Billet Forged Superlite calipers either 4 piston or 6 piston on the front, and 4 piston rears with 12.19"x1.25" directional veined rotors. I am currently running the 6 piston SL6 on the front of my conversion and the stopping power is incredible. We are trying to get a feel for the interest so that we can leverage volume at the machine shop. The following is the post from T'Bricks

Alright folks, it’s feeler time for these things.

What Dale and I plan on offering are Big Brake Kits for 700s, using Wilwood components. While we’ve been mostly talking about it in the Article Composition forum without too much to show, we’re getting down to the short strokes of producing these parts. What we need from you folk are SERIOUS COMMITMENTS, preferably in the form of a non-refundable deposit (of course it will be refunded if Dale and I can’t make it work – you just won’t get your deposit refunded if you back out of the deal).

These brakes are designed around the Billet Forged Superlite series of calipers, which are of the opposed 4 piston design. Front and rear calipers look the same, share the same external dimensions, and take the same pad, but have different piston sizes inside. The rotors used will be 12.19” diameter x 1.25” thick, directionally vented fixed (not floating) UL series. These parts have been designed to fit behind 16” Hydra wheels without any kind of spacing or relieving required, though on some cars a small amount of grinding might be necessary on the balljoint (just to relieve some of the forging parting line, nothing structural). I’ve redesigned the bracket and hopefully solved this problem, but some cars might still need some slight clearances. The factory front dust shields must be removed completely and the rear dust shields must be trimmed down.

The off-the-shelf Wilwood stuff that we’ve designed our parts around are the most cost-effective parts they offer: high quality stuff, but surprisingly inexpensive. The calipers, rotors, pads, etc., should cost you about $500 per end, or about $1000 for the full car. There will be some extras like hoses & stuff that you’ll have to find, and we’ll help you find them if possible. We might even offer the hoses and fittings in the future, depending on the demand. If you require even more stopping power, the much more expensive 6 piston calipers can be fitted to the fronts, and bigger rear calipers can be specified. We’ll leave that up to the end user, helping out with more information as we gain experience.

There are limited piston sizes offered in this series, but the calipers we’re looking at using have 1.38” pistons in the front and 1.12” pistons in the rear. 1.38” pistons are about 35mm, which are slightly smaller than the stock 740 or 240 front pistons, but the rotor is much bigger in diameter and will more than compensate for the smaller pistons. The net result is that by installing the front brakes alone, the front/rear balance shouldn’t be upset too badly (though front bias will probably go up). The rear calipers on a 740 have single 38mm pistons, which has the same area as two 1.06” pistons. 1.12” pistons will give a bit more stopping power in the rear, along with the slightly bigger rear rotor. The net result is that when installing the rear BBK along with the fronts, brake bias should move slightly to the rear, giving the car a bit more entertaining on-track performance, especially during trail-braking. This will defeat the European standard of heavily over-braking the front, in an effort to ensure the car exits the road nose-first, so beware. Also be aware that we haven’t actually driven a “normal” car with these brakes on it yet, so we aren’t 100% sure about the piston sizes yet, or if any other components like proportioning valves or master cylinders will be needed.

If the front can be installed by itself and still use stock rears, can it be assumed that the brakes aren’t any more powerful, and therefore won’t stop the car any better? Not really: Stock Volvo brakes (240 brakes, anyway) are very powerful and can stop the car from a high rate of speed in a relatively short distance… once. Performance-oriented owners will install more aggressive pads that will tolerate more heat, but are harder on rotors and require a warmup period. In both cases, the small-ish rotors are somewhat difficult to modulate right on the edge of lockup, when compared to bigger brakes. The benefit to the bigger brakes is that they don’t heat up as much or as quickly, so milder pads can be fitted without worry of the pads falling out of their heat range. Modulation will be better because of the more predictable nature of the pads being in their heat range all the time, therefore it’s easier for the driver to maintain near-lockup from the moment of brake application to the point where the car is stopped. Furthermore, stop after stop can be made from high speed, only limited by the heat dissipation ability of the rear brakes. Adding our rear brakes should pretty much eliminate overheating no matter how aggressively the car is driven, and shifts brake bias to the rear for better turn-in and trail braking.

We don’t have final pricing yet, so things might go up or down a little bit, but we have some preliminaries for you to chew over:

Front parts kit, includes one pair of 6061-T6 aluminum rotor hats and one each (L/R) 6061-T6 caliper brackets. Approximate selling price $350 USD.

Rear parts kit, includes one pair of cast iron rotor hats (allowing full parking/emergency brake privileges) and one each (L/R) 6061-T6 caliper brackets. Approximate selling price $300 USD.

We are planning on buying enough parts for roughly 20 cars, with a bunch of extra rear hats since it’s more cost effective to buy cast iron components in larger quantities. Even so, we’re looking at a large investment of money out of our pockets, so we need to know that we’re going to sell them! Not that it matters much to you, but our investment won't get paid back until we're into our second run of these kits... We plan on designing kits for 240s as well once this run of 740 parts is over, using the same hats but with different caliper brackets, but for now please concern yourselves only with the 740 parts. Delivery will be May-ish, so there’s a bit of time yet, though if you’d like to secure your place, Dale will gladly take 50% down payments. We won’t be posting your names here so’s not to ruin any surprise you might be planning.

Remember: these are racing components and are meant for race cars. If you’re using them on the street, let it be known that there are no dust shields on these pistons, though Wilwood states none are needed and many other folks have said that years of use on the street have uncovered no problems. Like all racing components, neither Wilwood nor Avalanche (Dale & myself) offer any kind of warranty, guarantee, or liability of any kind on these parts besides obvious manufacturing defects. If you’re contemplating putting these parts on your car, you’d better be able to swing a wrench and not bother us with little finicky details.
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Volvord 784VC www.telusplanet.net/public/gilesij/Volvord