...about my brakes. Right before Frank/71Gold wrote his tech article, I was paying attention to his posts about his rear disc brake experiments. I was extremely interested, so I amassed a lot of brake parts from various cars at the local junkyard, stockpiled them with intent to figure out what works best and do the swap as soon as I had time. Then Frank wrote his article and took all the guesswork out of it. "Eureka," says I, "I must go back to the Pull-A-Part and score me some Explorer brakes." So I did. Eventually I installed them, and every time it's come up I've said "I have '96 Explorer rear disc brakes." And then it came time to buy new pads for them... Nope. These are not '96 Explorer brakes. The new pads are way too small. It would seem I had gone to the trouble of pulling a complete set of rear brakes off an Explorer, then completely disregarded them and used God knows what from my random pile of brake parts instead. Perfect. But I still need some pads. Now what kinda brakes DO I have... I remembered I'd pulled brakes from a later model Town Car, and a PI Crown Vic in addition to the Explorer. Now, did I get the year wrong? Are these actually Explorer brakes but not '96 as I'd thought? Or Town Car? Cop car? I pulled up rockauto.com and started looking up pictures of brake pads trying to match them. No Explorer stuff looked right. Town Car... I'd remembered it was a 2000ish car, but I also remembered the calipers weren't both on the same side of the rotors. One was behind it, one was in front, and both of mine are behind the rotor, so that's out. That left the CVPI. I looked up a few random years and found a match for '95. So. We can add to the collective knowledge base here that '95ish Crown Vic brakes can fit the rear of our cars. A description of how I did it is here. Just ignore the parts where I say they're Explorer brakes. FYI, these brakes have slightly larger calipers and rotors than the Explorer. Very slightly. But they do have much bigger pads. They also cross-reference to these other cars: '91-'95 Town Car '92-'95 Grand Marquis '92-'95 Crown Vic '93-'95 Crown Vic Police Interceptor
That's not lying,That is just a simple hic-up in the memory banks due to a malfunction in the inventory identification process. But great things have been accomplished because of it.
Awesome you just gave everyone more vehicles to choose from, I know where a couple of CVPI bone yards are
I have a 98 Explorer Sport (2 door) ... just replaced the rear pads lately. When I opened the box up to look at the new pads, thought ... "you have to be kidding me ... these tiny things stop that beast!?!" ... they really are comically small. They work well, though, so I wouldn't completely write them off in a car that weighs 1000 lbs less. Front brakes are what do the most work in slowing a car down.... 2/3rds or more of the stopping force in most vehicles.
Not writing them off at all. I'm sure they work very well and they're no doubt a lot better than drums.
