Sitrep on the chassis clearancing for the big wheels:
I have the front right corner all welded up.
Rebuilding the wheel well involved 13 different hand made sections, including several internal support pieces to ensure load transfer isn’t compromised.
I was going to move to the left side and do the same, but on the driver’s side there’s a complication: the tire hits the clutch master. Significantly. Yeahhh, you read that right.
So the clutch master can’t be on the engine side of the firewall. The need to re-do the clutch pedal snowballed a bit, and I’m doing a full pedal box now, so the booster and 929 MC will be deleted.
A pedal box isn’t a small bit of work, so that’s what I’ve been working on for the past week and a half. It really changes the ergonomics as well. I had to re-build the throttle pedal mount to raise that pedal 2″ so it is in-line with the new pedals as my heel sits on the false floor now.
Here’s an in-progress shot as its sits right now. Everything is mounted and the false floor is made. I have some grippy stuff on the way for the floor. Next up is to measure and figure out each line length, fittings, etc. and get all the brake and clutch lines in the works.
A non-boosted brake system needs entirely different piston sizes at both the masters and the calipers than a boosted system. So I’ve been back and forth with the StopTech guys and we’re swapping all the calipers out for new ones with different piston sizes to make everything right for the new configuration. Conveniently, I was already going to have to basically build a whole new brake system at each corner anyways thanks to the 5 lug change… so it’s the right time to do this.
I chose the 850 pedal box because it has a throttle pedal with DBW compatibility. When I move to a standalone ECU (more on that later), if there are any issues with the GM pedal I could switch to the Tilton pedal and DBW sensor which is easy to configure in a standalone.
The necessity to dramatically change the brakes really stemmed from two things:
A) The 5 lug conversion meant the rotor hats had to change. That of course had a domino effect; rotor hat diameter increased slightly, causing caliper interference, etc. etc. and ultimately it led to revisiting every component in the brake system on all four corners…
B) When I discovered the larger tires interfered with the clutch master cylinder, I had to figure out a new clutch pedal/MC at a minimum, and that lead things down the path of deciding a pedal box was the way to go since it would solve my clutch pedal needs, and eliminating the brake MCs in the engine bay would free up some much needed space as well.