Gt500, or S550 mustang gt base 4 pot brakes

[J_Train]

it bolts like your first picture. that how its designed. they guy makes them for Rangers all the time its a set up to run S197 GT brakes. So I figured going by the work ive done on mustangs that I could go to the GT500/BOSS set up since there is no difference other than rotor and caliper. So the machined Explorer rotor was machined to place the 14 inch rotor right where it needs to be to work with the bracket and place the caliper centered over the rotor.


Also the reason Im thinking of using a S550 4 piston caliper is because I have spoke with fully torqued racing and when they put the S550 calipers on the 14 inch Brembo kit all they had to do was mill a section off the back of the mounting flange and space it out very little to center it.

 

[CDW6212R]

You should probably change to the other caliper you mentioned, if it'll fit better. Otherwise I think you'd need to alter the bracket. If you mount it on the back side instead, then you would need to add materiel to the caliper mounting areas, which would then clear those calipers you have. But that's more work, then you are re-engineering the bracket like I did to build mine.

 

[J_Train]

update kind of. I've been beating my brains in trying to get this done with out modifying the calipers and didn't think about spacers. ive done this in the past on other vehicles. All I need to do is to get ARP extended wheel studs a 1/2 inch spacer to get between the machined hub and rotor then get 4 1" diameter x 1/2" thick with a 1/2" hole spacers for the caliper brackets adapters then I will not need to modify the calipers and wont have the need for wheel spacers either. I'll post a half ass picture of what I'm talking about later today.

 

[J_Train]

The nuts are just for reference. I will have actual spacer made to fill the half inch gap so I don't have to modify the calipers.

 

[CDW6212R]

Very nice, that's looking good.

 

[J_Train]

it was just one of those things that I had spent so much time with the guy making the bracket and getting stuff for the s197 (stock gt calipers) to fit the explorer/ranger spindle that when I went to bolt it to the boss 302 caliper and it didn't fit ( because I didn't think about the bracing cast into it) so it kind of fogged my thinking. So I bought the S550 calipers since they didn't have the bracing like the BOSS calipers but still hit a wall. Again my thinking being fogged, I didn't think to make spacers to push the brackets from the calipers, until I was doing it with a friends racecar.

 

[CDW6212R]

Here's a few pictures of my process from 2005 or so. I began with a simple 1/2" thick bracket. The I discovered I didn't like the Cobra rotor's offset, .350", versus just under 1.5" for our stock rotors. So I decided to move the caliper inboard and use custom rotors that have the right offsets. That meant mounting the brackets on the back side of the spindle, and adding a thickness to them to reach the calipers. I used washers to find the right thickness, and had two pieces of steel cut and welded to the first brackets. Lots of massaging and test fitting, and I ended up with the clean and painted parts, soon to make them look like normal used parts.