[s-cars] Rotor & Caliper Incunabula

[Frank Amoroso]

Taka, all,

Not sure that I am buying that monoblocs are "prone to failure."

They certainly are less expensive to manufacture on a large scale, and
that certainly comes into play for the accountants, but don't go
equating less expensive with inferior.

the 996 GT3Rs use Monoblocs and I know for a fact that they aren't
replaced every week. I know Racer's Group does not do this, and a local
gearhead with a GT3R has the same set of calipers on that came with the
car when he bought it used a year ago.

I find the term "Prone to failure" to be poor word choice. Do you mean
that they will fail under some non-real world lab test? That is all well
and good, but the real question becomes is this failure one stop more
than the most severe real-world driving requirements or a million more
stops? You can bet it certainly isn't benchmarked at one less stop than
required.

The 8 piston caliper could be considered less stout (I can't imagine
using the comparitive form of the adjective "weaker" though, as the
connotation is all wrong) than the 6 piston because its long axis
entails a longer span from end-to-end. That 6 piston is one beefy,
blocky, boxy, heavy sonuvabitch. Nevertheless, they both seem up to the
task at hand.

Fact of the matter is that all calipers flex. The clear coat on my
powdercoated 996tt monoblocs cracked from caliper flex after I first
mounted them and bled the system. These brakes have been tracked hard
with R tires and Pagid Orange pads. No penchant for failure yet. BTW,
the 993tt rotors have held up nicely to this abuse (on a ~4,000 vehicle,
this qualifies as abuse).

Frank at s-cars.org