1983 Brake Resto Effort

[DSPTurtle]

Every few months I start a Porsche project that I think is going to be pretty easy and relatively quick. This summer I decided to replace a broken headstud in my 930S and though it would take about a week. Three months later I was finally rolling down the road.
This time I figured I would tackle the brakes on the 944 just to see if I could figure out why the car seems to eat brake pads at every track event. Well, as soon as I popped the piston out of the right front cup I knew it was time to R&R all the calipers. But, instead of just putting new seals and boots on the calipers, I got the crazy idea that I would clean them up. Cleaning did not do too much so I started to look into painting them. I saw a guy on here that had talked about cleaning off the heavy casting marks before painting everything. 80 grit sand paper was not making a dent and even after bead blasting they looked pretty rough, so I started the hunt through the garage for the dremel...
Here is what I started with...





With the dremel I was able to get everything smoothed out nicely but I knew the paint had no chance at sticking...



So I hit my beautiful dremel job with the sand blaster...



That looked promising so I started to paint. But, I wanted to do something different but not be a wannabe with bright red single piston calipers so I decided to paint the frames and sliders in gloss black and the piston cups in a nice silver. The two tone actually looks pretty cool!!!













Over all, this project was really messy, very dirty, really loud but a ton of fun!!! I definitely have a new appreciation for how all the parts in the braking system fit together and bring the car to a stop. There are some definite limitations to the single piston setup... but at least I won't be able to blame super old brakes for lack of stopping power.
I put a new set of R4 pads in the back and am deciding between R4 and a set of Hawk pads that I have on the shelf for my next Sebring outing. I think I will stick with the broken in R4's till I put a few hundred street miles on it jsut to be sure that I put everything back together correctly.
I might even buy new hardware kits for the calipers since they look rusted and crappy. But then again, the whole point of this endeavor was to see how cheaply I could do a project... for once.
Sorry for all the pics, but they are much more illustrative then any words could be!!!

[Dark Skies]

Did you remember to get the piston recesses at the correct degree of rotation?

[DSPTurtle]

LOL... I am 90% sure that I got them within 5 degrees of the spec. But, from the look of the pads that I took out, more specifically the back of the inner pad, they were randomly placed for the last however many years. So anything closer to correct will hopefully be a good thing

[ernie9944]

dspturtle in your futur projects if you want a nice paint for detailing it's call dupli-COLOR metalcast come in all kinds of colors work specialy well on alluminium both steel &all has to be very clean apply small layers at the time until you get desired hue once it dry it is avery tuff paint also heat resistant yuo can even wrench it without chipping if you to ernie 944 engin details you will see what i mean nice calipers you end up with ,different to

[944 boy]

thats very nice! I definitely need a san blaster, thats better than the job I did.