Quote: Ah! The Big Block manual trans dakota dude! Welcome! And I am glad to see you're doing this too. Cool!
Yeah, my fear is the front kit brackets. I bought the rear brackets off a friend so they are all I have. They were available.
But I have seen some instances of the kit mounts failing in the front. Someone made a bracket that attached to the dust shield holes and while I dont know if that alone is the problem, failures have happened from what I've read. I don't know what the factors were or anything like that though. I'm sure the holes could be enlarged to work fine, but maybe not?
But now the dilemma is I'll have a 13 inch rotor with a gen2 viper rear caliper out back, and an 11.3 inch rotor out front with a single piston floating dakota caliper.
Part of me wants to say that's dumb. lol And if andyF can fit big brakes inside a 15 inch wheel, I can at least fit them in a 17 inch wheel without any goofy spacer required with the factory wheels I'm not using.
I just wanted to get more visuals on the approaches people were taking to do this, so I can adapt them to my own junk.
The stock brakes IMO were fine slowing down the lame factory EFI engine back in the day, but now i have to slow this puppy down which is what I guess you could call a medium strength street 408...about a 500hp combo typical of a lot of Brian H's similarly spec'd builds over at IMM. So I need better brakes.
HA! yup, that was me!
the spacer issue is with the stock R/T rims, due to the shape of the spokes and the "offset" of those factory rims. and that they're so thick, bulky and heavy. if you use aftermarket rims, then you can fit 17" wheels without spacers.
the failed kits are the ones I'm using, and just posted pictures of. the ones that attached using the stock dust shield bolts. those are very small bolts to be using to mount giant brakes.
there's another kit out there that uses the 03/04 spindles, and those have been great, no problems with those at all, problem is, nobody is making those anymore, gotta make your own. (and they had the same issue, with the stock R/T rims needing spacers) I helped a buddy put those on his truck, swapped spindles, and used the kit parts that he bought used. he loves those brakes.
I asked Andy F about my brackets, and he said 3/8" bolts would be plenty, since there's 3 of them, when you consider that the factory only used two 1/2" bolts to mount the calipers on the vipers.
