A high performance car really isn’t high performance unless it has stopping power to match its acceleration abilities, and we turned to Baer for the performance brakes on the Royal Sport Camaro project.
Our friend and GM tech Curt Peters came to help us install the Baer Track rear brake system under the Speedway Engineering rear axle but the installation went so smoothly and easily that we actually thought we did something wrong!
The Baer Track system starts with these CNC billet aluminum black anodized caliper brackets, which simply bolt to the axle retaining plates. These brackets are designed to allow the caliper to be mounted in various clock positions to accommodate various installation situations.
Curt started the job by installing the calipers brackets on the rear axle housing. The rear calipers used in the Baer Track system are a single piston design made by PBR in Australia. The feature an integrated emergency brake, and Baer sells a variety of different pad compounds for various street or track conditions.
Next Curt installed the rotor and held it in place with a spare lug nut. The Baer rotors measure 13” in diameter and are drilled, slotted, vented and zinc washed to keep the heat and the corrosion down.
Installing the calipers is another pretty simple task. Simply compress the preloaded PBR single piston calipers to squeeze them over the rotor and bolt them in place. You’ll have to check the position of the caliper over the rotor to make sure it’s centered between the pads. In our case, Curt used some Vernier Calipers to determine that the caliper should be spaced off the bracket approximately .060” to center the rotor. Baer supplies several spacers with their kits for this reason. They come in widths of .060”, .030”, and .010”. You can combine them in any order to make any size shim that you might need.
It’s important to get the right brackets that match your style of rear axle housing. We’re using a Ford 9” style housing with Torino, or large bearing, bolt in axles. The two-piece caliper bracket consists of a base, which goes on the axle retainer, and the caliper bracket that bolts to the top of the base. Next, Curt reinstalled the rotor and the .060” shim worked perfectly.
The Baer kit also comes with stainless steel braided brake hoses and Curt laid those out next. The stainless braided hoses help to keep a firm pedal by not allowing the brake hose to expand under hard braking. They also add a racy appearance to the brake system. Its important to route the hoses loose enough to be able to remove the caliper for pad changes without having to crack open the brake hose fitting. However, the hose has to be tight enough not to catch on anything or dangle off the axle.
Baer supplies these right angle brackets to hold the fitting side of the hose and large diameter hose clamps to hold them in place. We are going to TIG weld these brackets to our housing. We’ll be installing the rest of this brake system in an upcoming story, but we were very impressed with the forethought that Baer used in packaging this rear Bear Track brake system. We like the fact that they included everything in the kit so that we didn’t have to make runs to the part store half way through the install.
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