R32 GTE

[narita]

Has anyone put r32 gte brakes on their mx5?

[manga_blue]

You just have to make up new caliper brackets and fit big wheels. I can lend you a block of steel and a file for the brackets unless you can think of something harder for the forum to solve for you first.

[narita]

Ok excuse my ignorance but would one just the gte caliper or the disk also?

I saw this setup in a hyper rev and became quite curious as you would imagine!

[narita]

[MattR]

Quick answer, yes you can fit GTR brakes to your car.

But before the long answer, you have to ask why do you want to change the brakes? If it is for cosmetic purposes then you are better off getting some $20 caliper covers off ebay. If its to upgrade the braking performance over standard there is plenty you can do to improve the braking before spending money on a brake conversion.

Long answer, but there is a lot more than just throwing on a caliper and rotor.

First thing, why do you want to upgrade the brakes. Unless you are going racing you really don't need to do more than the following:
1. Flush fluid and replace with a good quality dot 4 fluid, personally I use the Penrite brake fluid used to be called SIN but not sure now as I had plenty of bottles left before they changed the name, it is all you need and is a good price. It can be used in a daily driver or race car. Basically I use it in all my cars with no problems.
2. Replace brake pads with high performance pads, selection is important. I use Hawk HP in my NA6 for road and track days, there are plenty to choose from as seen on the forum. Good quality road pads, such as Bendix Ultimates or TRW, will also work well for spirited driving or track days where you are only doing 5 or so laps at a time. Other pad choices would also be QFM, EB, Ferodo, Endless. Basically how much do you want to spend
3. Look at replacing flexible rubber brake lines to calipers with braided lines, plenty to choose from that are road legal, ie ADR approved. These will improve the feel of the brakes as the rubber hoses expand slightly under pressure, not really an issue when the hoses are in good condition, but if you need to replace the rubber hoses through age and deterioration the just get the braided lines for the couple of hundred dollars.

If you still want to upgrade your brakes after doing the above, again why???? The above will be fine for 95% of any driving, road or track, that you will do.

If you want to upgrade, the easiest is to then do the standard swaps, NB onto NA and so on.

If you want to have big 4 spot calipers on the front, then it would be cheaper to get one of the many kits available here and OS. One example is the Wilwood brake upgrade using the dynalite caliper, from memory. These generally come with all you need to fit up including dog bones and new lines as well as pads to suit.

Once you start playing with bigger calipers then you need to look at things like will the master cylinder have the right capacity for fluid, go too big in the piston sizes at the calipers and you may not have enough fluid capacity for the M/C. If you go up in M/C size can you cope with the extra brake pedal pressure? going from a 5/16" cylinder to a 1" cylinder with no booster makes for a comparatively stiff pedal, again, both are very stiff compared to a boosted system.

Again with the bigger volume of fluid to push around, what is the sensitivity of the brakes feel like, can you modulate the pedal easily around the point of lock up? Do you need to look at removing the booster to give more feel at the expense of a very hard pedal.

If you upgrage the front calipers only and not the rear you can upset the brake balance front to rear and have either end locking up whilst the other does nothing, cheap fix is a brake proportioning valve to rectify this, but this is a ban aid solution, better solution is to sit down and calculate the piston sizes of front to rear to ensure balance for the fluid moved so both front and rear brakes work correctly, the bias valve really should only be used for minor adjustment of balance to tune the brakes to changes in conditions, eg wet track pull a little front brake out. so only really for racing.

The question of rotors then comes into play, the Nissan rotor will probably be all wrong for the MX5 so you then have to trawl through parts books looking for a rotor of the same size and thickness that will sit in the middle of your caliper and still mount onto the Mazda hub in the right location. This may still necessitate additional machining or drilling to get the rotor of your choice to fit.

If you look at the cars that are raced, most of them run standard brakes as the KISS principle works well in racing. The really quick 2B cars in prod sports still run surprisingly standard brakes.

The MX5 is a nice light car and therefore doesn't really need much in big brakes to stop well. Overbraking a car can be as big a problem as underbraking a car.

Hope this post helps.

[narita]

Thank you sir.

You very well may be the most helpfull person on this forum.

Appreciate the advice.