Installing the Front Rotors and Caliper Bracket
My plans called for disk brakes to be used up front replacing the stock drum brakes but retaining the stock 1937 spindles. Chassis Engineering supplied the basic disk brake kit that included the caliper mounting bracket, inner bearing adaptor, innear bearings, seal and mounting hardware. New rotors and outer bearing were supplied from my local friendly parts man. New dropped steering arms are also installed at this time and came with the Chassis Engineering front suspension package.
Before everything can be bolted in place some work needs to be performed to the stock spindles. New kingpin bushings bushing should be installed, the stock steering arm needs to be cut off and the new inner bearing adaptor needs pressed onto the spindle. My kingpin work had already been done and I used my stepfathers press and his help to press on the adaptors. I should have cut off the steering arms first as that would have made the job a little bit easier. Next up was to cut off the stock steering arms with my cutoff wheel. Use a little care here on your cuts, with the spindle pointed down on my portable bench the cut needs to be at an angle parallel to the kingpin holes. I cut half way from each side and smoothed it all off with my hand held grinder.
With the modifications finished I testt fitted my spindles to my axle. One thing became clear real fast, I was having a clearance problem between the back of my spindles and the axle. I could get the spindle on in one place and would only turn about three degrees and the bearing would not fit. What I found was a combination of things. First there was a small ridge on the back of my spindle below the upper kingpin boss. This was not letting my spindle fit down on the axle all the way. The axle had a flat spot ground on the upper boss, this was the area I could get ny spindle to fit. A small amount of grinding on the back of my spindles and some grinding on the axle to remove a small amount of material on the outer upper edges of the axle fixed my problem. Everything would now fit and full turning motion was restored. The tapered pins was installed to hold the kinpins in place and turn stops installed left over from some 1946 parts.
Now it is time to install the dropped steering arms and caliper brackets. When ordering parts make sure they will all work together. My steering arms came with milled rear legs to fit the caliper mount. As you can see the rear leg is much shorted than than the front. You can also see that I had to modify the front leg. I had to grind a small pocket on each steering arm to clear the grease fittings. The lower grease fitting also need to be changed to 90 degrees fittings so you can grease the lower kingpin bushings. Another and maybe better option would be to drill nad tap new holes in the spindle in the location of the old steering arms. If you want to do this I would recommend it be done before the kingpins and bushings are installed.
Finally it was time to bolt on the caliper brackets and steering arms. The caliper bracket goes on first. The kit comes with spacers that fit between the back side of the spindles and the brackets. With the top two bolts holding the bracket in place the spacer was installed at the rear bottom mounting hole and the steering arm installed. During mockup I noticed the supplied bolts for the steeting arms would only fit one way. The bolts must come through from the backside of the spindles leaving the threaded end protruding to the back side of the spindle so all bolts were installed this way.
Next up was to install the new rotors to the spindles. I called my friend Tom into action here to back the bearings and install the rear seal. Tom noticed the race in the new Camaro rotors was a liitle narrower than the new bearing and race provided by Chassis Engineering. The installed race was knocked out of the rotor and the new one installed. There was no mention of this in the directions and I would have never checked, Thanks Tom!With the new rotors ready to install I slide them in place, added the little spacer between the bearing and my spindle washer and tightened them down. One of my concerns was the protruding bolts from the steering arms hitting the rotors. As you can see there is no problem as they fit in the hollow portion of the rotor. This turned out to be a little more time consuming than I thought due to the clearance problems and driving around for press work but it all turned out well.
