52 chevy brakes

I'm rebuilding my front end and trying to decide on which brakes to go for. I have a 52 chevy coupe that I'm turning into a daily driven hot rod...not a show/drag/custom/expensive car.

Another member told me to go for any 80s gm model 11 inch front disc brakes and buy a conversion kit that has a bracket/bearing spacers so I can use my stock spindles. Has anybody else done this? Any recommendations? Words of caution? Mistakes they wouldn't make twice?

 

I used the chassis engineering kit on my 54. Pretty straight forward. No complaints so far.

Just had to cut off these tabs

 

I bought a kit from R&B's, but I thik they are out of business.

I bought everything at once so I knew everything fit together. a buddy tried to source his parts from the parts house to save money and spent more time chasing parts and retuning the wrong ones to make any savings he may have got not worth the hassle

 

Oh and if you look it up it's chassisengineeringinc.com. Without the "inc" it's racing parts.

 

So Cretin did you get the complete IFS or just the disc brakes?

Thanks for the tip about the hassle factor. I'm considering that a lot which is why I'm trying to find out who used what and if they liked it.

 

Most of the stock stuff you can still get off the shelf for the bendix drum front brakes, there's a wide interchange there. Chevy used them up front through '58 and on the rears through at least '64. That's what I plan to run on mine.

 

I may be interested in your old parts if you go the disc brake route...

 

I will be glad to sell any of my used parts to other members. If you're local, I can always meet you to drop them off (if they're small enough) or invite you over.

 

I may be interested, I am looking into swapping them onto the front of my '40 chevy pickup in order to get bendix brakes and five lug hubs - if I understand correctly they should swap directly on but I need to do some more research...

 

We do a bolt on 11 inc rotor BIG piston GM caliper kit for your 52. Give us a call 860-872-7046

 

I just did the brakes, those are on the stock spindles.

 

I did a disc brake conversion on a 60 corvette (same suspension as yours).I believe it was from Master Power brakes and it was a nice kit. You should think about upgrading your master cyl at the same time.

 

I used the ECI conversion on my '53. It's great, only thing I had to do was cut the tabs off like cretin was talking about in post #2.

 

Would you recommend going with a bracket kit and buying the calipers/rotors/pads from an autoparts store to save money or buy it all in a package? - RatFink...is this what you were talking about with sourcing from a parts house?

ECI, Chassis Engineering and Jamco Suspension all have very reasonable costs....if I ask which is preferred, will I start a fight?

 

yeah... dude got a discount at the parts house so he bought the brackets and bearing adapters. then had some hassles with wrong parts he got. I just got mine from one source so it all worked out easy..

 

I have a ECI kit on my 50 works great.

 

I have 100 % stock brakes on my '51 wagon, new everything from the rubber lines to the master cylinder then had the drums turned and it stops the ol' girl just fine... of course the driveline is still stock, and my top speed is about 54 m.p.h. ,...so I don't have to plan that much ahead to stop quickly

Brian.

 

Here's a post I did on the ECI set up in my 49 (with stock spindles, but dropped uprights). I couldn't be happier.

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=179331