Hey all,
has anyone out there run ducting to their front wheels to promote decent cooling? I'm getting a bit of break fade heppening when towing and when dancing on the pedals, so it would be nice to have that little bit of insurance. A lot of the work I do with rural surveys and stuff involves me accelerating/decelerating to/from highway speed - so things get mighty hot at times. I know the TH and above have those little cup looking tings that look like they go to the brakes however they are solid and the front wheel arch is thin plastic, behind which is the engine bay. I have a TE with pop out panels for factory fogs - I was thinking of using a hot knife to slot these, and running perforated flexible ag pipe ($2.50 per metre for 65mm diametre) through the the base of the engine bay and in to those plastic wheel arch things.
Anyone tried ducting before? If so what methods have you used?

I know many of you are running the bendix bads, however my mechanic informs me these will rapidly chew up my discs as OEMs are a "soft" carbon steel. I replace my discs often enough as it is! Depending on comments, DIY may not be acceptable and I'll just have to pay a pro to do it.

Cheers
David

Sounds interesting. Let us know how it turns out, alot of ppl on AM are always interested to hear about cheap, effective DIY jobs. Im keen to hear how it goes as a bit of extra break cooling at no big expense could come in handy.

Cheers.

Hey david,

In my opinion, saying that "bendix" will chew your rotors is rubbish. All suppliers have different compounds. The more metal and harder the compound, the easier they will chew your rotors and thats the same regardless of brand. Its always a trade off, chew your rotors or chew your pads.
Bendix are known to be the better quality pad and if you go for a softer compound with a good heat rating, i.e. performax or ultimate then you will minimise pad wear and rotor wear. Choose something like metal king and they will eat your rotors but induce minimal pad wear.

I think ducting air to your calipers will help a lot in reducing wear and in regards to the dealer saying your OEM's are soft carbon steel, well, all I would say is that they are a crap carbon steel. I just replaced all four discs with bendix slotted and all four OEMS were warped...how the hell can you warp rear discs through normal driving!!!!??? :nuts:

For your purposes I would probably suggest using a DBA sport disc (gold slotted and cross drilled) front and rear with a suitable high temp bendix pad. Add the ducting to this and you have a nice high temp setup.

Of course you could always go the way of others on this forum and fit ralliart or awd drive brakes and calipers and that would be the best solution for you, but then again, you need to see if cost is an option?

It's really not worth your trouble ducting air from bumper to brakes, if you are doing frequenty stop and start at high speeds, you really should replace the rotors (at least replace the front ones) to DBA heavy duty or slotted.

use good pads help alot as well, Ultimax, Performax are the two top heat PADs, both are Metallic, Metal King which is also metallic based lacks some of the high temp properties as the Ultimax and performax have. I had DTV and I used Metal kings for 2 weeks to grind it smoother and changed bendix advance back on for lower noise.

between the two (advanced and metal king), I Love how the metal king's pedal feel, it's very responsive and bites really really good, whereas the advanced is very soft compared to the metal king and despite the low noise, it takes quite a stomping in order for any form of agressive stop to happen.

thats just my opinion only .

Personally I'd rather chew through my rotors than have my brakes fail on me. Go for the better pads and make sure you don't overtorque your wheel nuts (I read that somewhere). When your rotors eventually go, then upgrade them to something better.

You can overtorque them?

I remember reading it on the US Diamante site and maybe (?) Tek mentioned something about it. Anyhows I use my torque wrench to tighten up my bolts instead of my rattle gun.

Check out this article from AutoSpeed
Auto Speed - Brake Stuff (http://www.autospeed.com/cms/A_0242/article.html)