Grand Am Brake Upgrade (Page 1/3)
steinke_andy APR 15, 08:25 PM
The title is pretty generic so that this can be easily found when searching.

My brother and I did the Grand Am brake upgrade between yesterday and today. Prior to us starting we did our research and found most of the information that we were looking for. There were however a couple questions that were not answered very well on the other topics. Also we couldn't find very many helpful pictures of certain parts of the upgrade.

This is not really a guide on how to do the actual upgrade itself. It might turn into that eventually but for now its just a bunch of pictures and information on how we did it and pictures that I think will help people that are wanting to do the upgrade themselves without buying a kit.

I guess a good place to start is with the end result.

Here is the drivers side rear brake.


and here is the drivers side front brake.


I will be working on posting the rest of the pictures with descriptions and all that fun stuff as I can. If there is anything that you are looking for specifically just let me know and I will answer it the best I can.

The car that this upgrade is on does not currently drive because we are waiting on a clutch slave cylinder that should be in in a couple of days. So I cannot really give any input on how well they work, also never drove this car before doing the brake upgrade.

AS

[This message has been edited by steinke_andy (edited 04-15-2012).]

steinke_andy APR 15, 08:35 PM
The first biggest question I had about the swap, and couldn't easily find the answer for, was what actually got machined off the front hub/rotor. We were lucky enough to have gotten the already machined hubs in a lot sale last year. This made the upgrade a little easier for us but didn't really answer the question of what changed. The following are pictures of the rotors we pulled off our car and the turned down rotors that we had.

This is the rotor we pulled off the car.




This is the hub (left) next to the new grand am rotor (right)




Here is a closeup of the side of the hub, you can see a little lip on it.


That lip is where the original rotor extended out. This helped me realize that all the machinist did was cut off the disc part of the rotor. If I am wrong please let me know, the point of this thread is to hopefully get more information about the grand am brake upgrade centralized into one spot.

AS
Blacktree APR 15, 08:56 PM
Yeah, basically you just cut off the disc. Although, if you want to get fancy, you can match the outer diameter of your modded hub to the inner diameter of the Grand Am brake rotor hat. You might want to leave a little "wiggle room", to allow for surface rust buildup.
steinke_andy APR 15, 09:04 PM
We had to modify the front mounting brackets so that the grand am calipers and rotors would mount up and spin freely.

There was slight interference between the caliper and the bracket here (between the yellow lines).


The bracket is painted black. At the yellow arrow, there is an obvious high spot on the bracket that interferes with the rotor. This has to be ground down. I made match the surrounding metal thickness. At the blue arrow (on the bracket), there is a similar issue which we treated the same way.



AS

[This message has been edited by steinke_andy (edited 04-15-2012).]

Blacktree APR 15, 09:14 PM
I have some photos from my Grand Am brake upgrade several years ago. They show the stuff you have to grind on. Mind if I post them?
steinke_andy APR 15, 09:16 PM
That would be great!
When we were looking for information about this upgrade, the information was scattered all over the place. Any input you (or anybody else) may have is greatly appreciated.
Hopefully this will be an all-in-one thread for the grand am brake upgrade.
mattwa APR 15, 09:24 PM
I don't know why, maybe it was the cheap rotors I bought, but my hubs had to have more removed to get the rotors to fit over them. I'm going to give this front setup to my dad shortly because I did an 88 cradle swap in the rear and now my brakes are poor. At that time I'm also going to be putting longer wheel studs in the hubs.


[This message has been edited by mattwa (edited 04-15-2012).]

Blacktree APR 15, 09:38 PM
OK, here ya go. The following photos show in detail where and how much to grind on the front caliper brackets.

This first photo shows you the areas that will need to be ground down.


The next photo illustrates that the brackets have a machined surface, which you can measure from. Thus you can make a measurement of the bracket thickness, and determine how much material to grind off.


The next photo shows you what thickness to grind the bracket down to. On my Fiero, the brackets were approximately 0.80" thick. I ground them down to about 0.65" thick.


I didn't take any measurements on the other interference point (where the bottom of the caliper hits the bracket). That was a "shave to fit" operation.
And this last photo shows you what the result should look like. Notice the gap between the rotor and the caliper bracket, where before there was interference.
BV MotorSports APR 16, 01:27 PM
You could go with Sunbird GT front brakes and not have to cut or grind anything. Of course, you will still need the hubs machined, but no other modifications.
TopNotch APR 16, 03:16 PM
What year Sunbird? I haven't heard that one before.