Too messy Shaz.
Too messy for a road car.
I think you really need to reasses things here. On many levels...
It's quite clear that you want a heavily modified car here. Cool. But, with all this talk of hydro handbrake, (it doesn't matter if it's removable or not)... You still have hydraulic brake lines coming into the car: illegal. Twin caliper rear discs... Custom backing plates, custom lines, seperate master...etc. Forget having a roadworthy car. If you get pulled over, you WILL get raped. No way you'll get this engineered.
Perhaps another diff choice is in order?
Sure, the R31 would be cheap and easy, but brakes are shit.
Are there any other diff options you could utilize that have more braking options?
Shaz - seriously reasses things here. Is this a road car? Or a racecar?
Because Racecar.
I'm still investigating other options for a rear brake setup that actually works man, as I'd prefer to do that.
Diff wise, there isn't very many options. R31 Diff will be cheapest for strength. $300 for full diff, $99 for a minispool, $250 to get mounts switched across and $200 for misc mods like handbrake cables and stuff to make fit. A T-Series diff will bolt straight in, but, you're looking at $600ish for a full disc to disc rear, THEN a m inimum of $900 for a TRD/Similar LSD. And, even after all that, the axles are weak, and the diff itself will be stressed behind a CA. The other option is a Hilux G series diff, which is strong as
, plenty of lockers available, but needs to be shortened, mounts switched, PCD converted, eetc etc. Won't be much change from $2k.Once this conversion happens Alex, it won't be used for daily duties anymore. I'll pickup a cheap slapper for dailys, and use this for weekends, etc.
I think a call to my local engineer is in order, and see exactly what he thinks of the seperate hydro setup. I reckon he'll either laugh, or hangup, but its worth a shot. He might even have a better idea of which way to go.
One axle is indeed longer than the other but it is a very bad idea to run two short axles and shorten the housing the 50mm or so to make up for it. This is because the short axle is in the long axle tube, yes I know it's confusing but it's due to the shape of the cast center. The diff pinion is already offset to side by about 30mm. By running two short axles this makes the center around 80mm off to one side which is a lot and apart from potential clearence issues you have the uni-joints running at an angle. The more proffesional way to shorten the axle tube that has the short axle in it. Now due to the shape the axle is you can not shorten an axle any less than 50mm as there is no material there to cut a spline into. So most likely for many of the people here they either flare their gaurds or they shorten the long tube with the shorter axle.
For people who want it narrower again you can put the short axle in the long side and shortened that and then get another short alxe and get it reduced by the minimum 50mm for the other side. This will give you a 1370mm diff which happens to be ideal for a TA22 and probably also pre ke70 corollas. It also sits the tailshaft and housing in an ideal location.
The breather hole also needs to be relocated as it ends up under the spring seat.
Now the god-aweful handbrake- it's not necessarily because it has disks, it's just a shocking design. To set the handbrake pad pre-load the piston is wound in and out much like an ae82 twinky, nothing out of the ordinary there. Here is the where the usual dumn nissan engineering comes in, the caliper piston has only one slot going down it. This means the adjustment of the handbrake has to be done in 180 degree intervals. So lets say the pads can be just short of fitting over the disk, you wind it in another half rotation and then most of the actuators travel is to just take up the gap between the pad and the disk. On the very small bright side it's easy to adapt unmodded S series cables with a tube spacer to the nissan calipers.
Now some other things:
- Nissan studs use a 1.25mm pitch unlike the 1.5mm toyota standard
- It's a bloody heavy thing as it has the crude cast center with welded tube deisng instead of the full fabricated housing.
- the AE/KE S-series diff pinion fits onto the r31 diff!! I would of beleived it had I not done it myself, comes straight off and swaps as it's the same spine coming both from Borg Warner.
edit** The other option is to run single VS Commodore calipers on the rear, and make it work with the hydrobrake. This was my original thought, until I started reading about the twin rear setup.
right off.
