I'm building a T gas altered to run at our local 1/8th mile track (Inspired by SamIam's BFD). I'd love to run some vintage spindle mounted 12 spokes, but their cost is hard to swallow, so I'll be running a pair of the 10 spoke Rocket Launcher wheels instead. Those wheels only come in 5x4.5 or 5x4.75 bolt spacing. The only spare hubs I have laying about were a pair of stock Model A hubs and a set of early 50's F100. Both are 5x5.5, and I want to keep the F100 hubs with the drums for a future project. So I was in need of a pair of hubs, with a bolt pattern I could use. My solution was to pick up a pair of cheap new disc rotors intended for a '75 duster in the 5x4.5 bolt spacing and modify them. The machine work was simple, consisting of rough cutting the rotors off the hub section with a cut off wheel in a grinder (the rotor was 1/2" to big to fit in my lathe or I would have just parted them off) and then chucking the hub in the lathe and parting the remaining material off. Both hubs only took 30 minutes to modify, so cheap ($35 per rotor) and quick I had a pair hubs in 5x4.5 bolt spacing. The bearings, spacers, seals on order from speedway.
This is fairly common practice when doing various flavors of aftermarket brake conversions that use separate rotors and hats, I have a set for my '64 Ford done this way (originally sized to fit inside 13.5x1.25 Mercedes ML55 rotors, but they turned out not to have deep enough hats for the wheel and caliper combination I decided to use) and I know of at least one aftermarket brake vendor who does this on some of his kits. I hadn't seen it done before for a brake-less axle, though.
I figure everything's been done for the first time by 4 or 5 different people, so I assumed this was done somewhere, for some reason. Just figured this might help someone out. I'll be running these on a pair of 32-34 spindles. The conversation with tech guy at Speedway was amusing. I told him what I was doing and asked him if I could just buy the needed spacers/bearings/seals from a disc brake kit they have listed, informing him I will be running modified hubs minus the disc. He then basically said no and informed me that at some point someone was going to want to run the calipers on my disc-less hubs and that I should just buy the hole kit. He then gave me the hard sell on a complete disc brake kit using GM based rotors 'cause the hub/rotor fit better. When I mentioned the 32-34 spindles he told me that it wouldn't work at all. I called back into the sales department and just gave the order taker the part numbers for what I wanted. He was very helpful and even made a worthwhile suggestion.
I was going to ask you what you did for bearings but I reread it and I guess Speedway carries a setup that uses those same rotors and spindles, so you were able to just buy the brearings and seals for that setup. Do you remember the part numbers for that kit because I may be doing the same setup in the future? Good tech , thanks for posting it. Don
I should get the parts sometime this week. Once I'm positive I got the right parts I'll confirm I used the correct part numbers. The full $100 kit (#91631921) includes the caliper bracket, inner bearings, bearing spacer and some hardware to bolt the bracket to the spindle. I pulled most of the part numbers I used from this kit, with the addition of some other parts.
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