FYI ... Met a guy at Moultrie from FLorida who sells Model T buckets rolling chassis. He uses Maverick 8-inch rears and sells disc brake kits specifically designed for them. For $235 you get the brackets, hardware and rotors. All you need to supply are the calipers. He said to use ElDorado calipers and the emergency break cables will hook up to them. Apparantly the calipers are fairly cheap. It looks like a great setup and that is what initially drew us to his booth. He then saw our Maverick T-shirts and starting asking us if we had any 8-inch rears for sale. If interested his name is David and phone is (352)383-3182. No website ....
IMO those calipers are not all that great. They seem to have constant problems. The internal parking brake mechanism seems to be th culprit. If you decide to use these use the parking brake relegiously.
I'm not familuar with those calipers but I can identify with emgency brake operation potential problems. For example the Lincoln rear disc setup from 86 to 90. The pad clearence must be set to within a specified value or the pads will grab the disc and lockup if the clearence is to large or drag and heatup if to close. The reason is how the internal e-brake operates. There are three balls that force the piston outward from the lever operation. If they are allowed to go to far they will not return to there seats. So my guess is that the Cad brakes get a bad rap because people don't get them right the first time and keep them within the reccomended setup for the way they are designed to work.
Just use the Exploder rear discs... You have to clean a tiny bit of material out of the backing plate holes to go from Metric to Standard bolts, then bolt it together... Dave
Exploder rear discs are basically a bolt-on. Drill the holes in the caliper bracket/back plate to 3/8" and bolt it up...but beware, the rear end housing has to be removed in order to get the caliper attatching bolts in. I cut the spacers slightly to make it easier, but the rear still had to be loosened from the springs to get the lower bolt in. Search the archives...I posted some pics on there a while back. They work great, though!
The eldorados calipers just tend to fail, installed right or wrong. I would tend to agree that the explorer set up looks like the best system.
I bought a set of those brackets off ebay that use the eldorado calipers. I wished I had known about the problems with them before hand. I might have reconsidered. Since I alread invested $100 for the brackets, I'll probably go ahead with them.
MavMan, Did you install the whole 8.8 rear in your car or did you robb the disc brake set up to install on your 8 in.?
