Upgraded brakes

[phatfire6]

Just tossed on some 4 pot calipers today. They sure do stop the car in a jiffy. Didn't take too long to install. Need to head out and bed the pads in. Took this pic with my cellphone:

[bellman246]

Thoes look sick! How much were they?

[bellman246]

are those lug covers BTW?

[phatfire6]

It is prohibitively expensive. You can buy the complete kit for roughly $2400. I bought them in separate pieces. Got the calipers and mounting brackets from the UK, and had locally manufactured rotors made at Coleman Racing. Besides it being significantly cheaper this way, the wallet shock was much less by spreading the cost out over a period of time so I could save for it.

These things surprised the crap out of me. I normally drive a Nissan Xterra, and the brake pedal requires a heavy foot for normal braking. Out on the first trip after the install, while braking while coming off of the highway, all of the stuff in my car went flying towards the front. This is going to take some time to get used to. It won't be fun to be a passenger in my car during this small learning period.

[phatfire6]

Yes, those are lug bolt covers

[jrll1981]

Those brakes are really cool looking, and work beautifully from what you described. Track ready?

[nicolas_p]

I got your new bumper sticker

[blackastra]

Originally Posted by jrll1981

Track ready?

Lol...Saturn Astra on the track. Good one.

[nicolas_p]

Just to revive an old thread, was size are the rotors. Because I want to get bigger brakes on my car but i am limited to 17" overall size because I have my winter rims?

[phatfire6]

You could have just sent me a text, Nick

Follow this link - it will open up a PDF file of a rotor spec sheet.

http://www.colemanracing.com/Assets/file/Hat_Rotor.pdf

I using the solid mount rotor, here are the dimensions in mm.

A= 28.0
B= 343.0 <--- This is the dimension you are looking for.
C= 198.0
D= 237.5
E= 215.9
F= 6.4
F= 12 holes
G= 6.5
H= N/A
I= N/A

Coleman can make you rotors at a significant savings. They can also make a custom bell for you as well. Combine the rotor/bell with a 13.5" compatible caliper, and you have yourself a deal.

As for the 17" part - they are designed to run in 18" wheels. Can they fit in 17" wheels? I'm pretty sure that it wont. The caliper and rotor are such an easy install, it shouldn't take you more than an hour to swap out to the stock calipers come winter time. I installed mine in about thirty minutes.

[romanster]

Can coleman do cross drilled rotors or do they prefer slotted? Did you give them dimensions from the AP bells to duplicate, or did they have a donor bell to use?


Another option on the cheaper side would be Cobalt SS Turbo front Brembo's, the Saab 9-3 guys are big on this retrofit since the refurb'd Brembo calipers can be found pretty cheap. They use 314mm rotors on the Saabs with this setup, it may be the same for our Astras, or we may keep the stock rotor size. All this with parts readily available in the States and Canada. We may need spacers to push the wheel farther out since the calipers are bigger, the cobalt and saab guys do this depending on their wheel clearances. It would all be trial and error at first, since I haven't seen this swap on an Astra before. They use the setup on 17" wheels too.

The oem Astra VXR/OPC front brakes are 322mm and are a direct swap onto all Astra H models. They also mount 345mm brakes from the Vectra VXR with some modification to the caliper carriers. I think some Saabs also come with 345mm front brakes, so that could be another option.

Of course if you want to ball out, the K-Sport kit for the Astra VXR is a 356mm rotor with 8-piston caliper and 18" min wheel size.
And for the truly rich, there is a guy in the UK VXR forum who can put together kits with Audi RS6/R8 390mm rotors for the Astra, and they just barely clear 19" wheels: