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Disc brakes
I’m interested on your parts list to convert my drums brakes to disc brakes… will you send it to me please?Originally Posted by 1550vt
Dave...my story was that I had a set of drums the pulled to one side. You know those things don't self-adjust and I have fooled with drum brakes since...well...way back. On a 4-wheel vehicle it may not be so noticeable to have one side out of adjustment, but on a trike, it could be deadly and almost was for me on one occasion. They worked fine as long as you jammed them and locked them up, but would pull under light-to-medium braking. I had a crisis and got pulled right out into oncoming traffic once, which was one time too many. Chalk it up to my inability to get them tweaked I guess. Anyway, Lehman had advertised a disk brake conversion kit on their website and most of the dealer sites as well. When I went shopping for one, nobody had any and they were not available. I had a friendly dealer up in Tennessee call the factory to see what this was all about and was told the only way I could do it was to change the entire rear-end....which is where the quoted price of $4,000 came from. I am pretty sure it had something to do with caliper mounts. I believe the original add for the conversion kit did not even show any caliper mounting brackets. I don't know what Lehman was doing when they offered the conversion, but I guess they got into a bunch of trouble...possibly a product liability issue or the fact they did not offer a bracket to mount the calipers....they seemed to be very closed-mouth about it and pulled it off the shelf, but not off the websites as an offering.
All I did was figure out what type of caliper bracket I needed and found a guy that made the brackets for drum-to-disk conversions for the hot-rod boys. I purchased a set of his brackets that bolted right up to the flange pattern on the Lehman axle housing, which is an 8.8 Ford. I did have to modify them a bit and used Tokico radial-mount calipers and it all works just fine with the stock HD master cylinder. I used a set of 1987-88 Ford T-Bird Turbo rear rotors (10-inch 4 x 108 bolt pattern) and had the inside 1/2 of the rotors turned off and down to around 8mm. A few spacers, hoses, bolts, nuts and bleeding....and I was off to the races. The calipers come off e-bay for around $30 a pair. I gave a bit less that $100 for the caliper mounting brackets and paid a machinist $37 to turn the rotors. The T-Bird rotors can be had for less that $50 a pair on sale.
The brakes are great and the pad wear is negligible after around 10,000 miles so far. If there is anybody out there that wants to make this conversion....I have the parts list and detailed instructions. The Tokico radial caliper is the ones used on the fronts of most metric crotch-rockets and is the same as the AP racing caliper...more-or-less. Pads are also plentiful and the total volume of these two opposed 4-piston calipers match the stock HD MC perfectly.
