The Club Jeffie Saturn Rear Disk brackets were designed for the 3rd gen J-Body but considering GM didn’t change the rear brake design for 15+ years, I thought I’d give it a shot.
Things I pulled from the junk yard can be found on 1991-2002 Saturn S-series with rear disks:
- Calipers with bleeder screw, brake line banjo bolt, slider pins, and e-brake bracket
- Caliper bracket with 10mm mounting bolts
- Rotor dust shield
Things I purchased new from parts store for the same application:
- Caliper repair kit (new seal and dust boot)
- Disk brake hardware kit (new slider dust boots, and brake pad retainers)
- Rear pads, and rotors re-drilled to 5x100
- Stainless steel brake lines
- 30cm of steel brake hard lines
When rebuilding the callipers, I found that the piston is actually screwed into the calliper so the known method of using compressed air to blow out the piston doesn’t work! Just simply take a pair of needle nose pliers and stick them into the groves on the piston where the pads line up and turn counter clockwise.
After removing all the rust and painting the junk yard parts, removal of the old hardware is fairly strait forward, jack up the car, take the rear wheels off, pop off the drum and unbolt the wheel bearing. With all the drum hardware still in piece, you can wiggle out the e-brake cable and unscrew the brake line going to the wheel cylinder.
From here, I took out all the hard lines on the rear axle while I changed out the J-body rear rubber brake lines to stainless steel ones as well. Using a short 30cm steel brake line bought from the parts store, I bent it to lead to the bottom of the hub just enough for the stainless steel line from the calliper to connect (installed at a later step)
All at once, the Club Jeffie bracket, rotor dust shield, and wheel bearing (in that order) were bolted to the axle using the provided Club Jeffie bolts using a 15mm socket for the nut and 1mm Allen key head for the bolt torque to 44ft/lbs from the nut on the back. Blue medium strength thread locker was used on all four bolts.
The rotor and calliper bracket was slide into place at once **one of the problems I ran into on the 2nd gen**. Since the 3/8ths bracket was ordered, shorter M10x1.5x30mm bolts were used, blue thread locker was put onto the threads and torque to 81ft/lbs.
New disk brake hardware was installed on the bracket and the calliper was put in place with high temp grease over the sliders. The slider bolts should be at 27ft/lbs.
Progress pictures were taken on one side and the close to finished product was of the other side because of some of the problems I had with faulty hardware. As of now, the car won’t be on its wheels for a while so there won’t be any complete pictures. Bleeding the brakes and e-brake routing still need to be figured out and I will update when I can.
Specific 2nd gen problems:
- Main issue is the routing of the e-brake to utilise the e-brake mechanism on the Saturn callipers, unlike the 3rd gen J-bodies, the rear springs sit on perches separate from the shock and inhibits conventional routing of the e-brake cable. The line will still reach the calliper e-brake bracket and function but the cable will sit between the first and second coil so bottoming out will sever your cable.
- The triangulation of the rear axle makes it hard to access the calliper bracket mounting bolts; the only option was to have the bolt already in place in the Club Jeffie bracket and slide the rotor/calliper bracket onto the hub together and tighten the bolts that way.
1993 Pontiac Sunbird 3400V6
2nd gen guys will love this
Very nicely done
Also got back to you on that PM.
Want hub spacers rear disk brackets or trailing arm bushings? Shoot me a PM.
Roofy wrote:
That's what I was wondering . Unless they welded up the old holes.
The car was in the body shop getting new quarters welded in while I was piecing everything together so I had lots of time on my hands. I had them welded up just for the sake of appearance. I probably won't be doing it again when I have to replace them. I grinded them down and painted them so they looked the part
1993 Pontiac Sunbird 3400V6
Damn good job
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~Using nitrous is like having sex with a hot chick with an STD, you wanna hit it, but your afraid of the consequences.~
PingPong: If I wanted to do the steel braided brake hoses for the rear of my 3rd gen Cavy with the Saturn swap.. could I do the same thing you did for the 2nd gen? If so I am not exactly sure what I would have to buy/do.
2000 Buick Regal GSE - "Gods Grocery Getter is powered by an L67 3800" -
333WHP
12.900 @ 109.91mph 2.166 60Ft (Fastest 1/4)
13.374 @ 110.01mph 2.467 60Ft (Fastest Trap)
2004 Chevy Cavalier - 15.7 @ 90mph (Semi-Modded)
Also I might as well ask where did you wind up buying the steel braided lines like that? I normally can only find them i kits pre-made for certain cars from like Russel or Goodridge
2000 Buick Regal GSE - "Gods Grocery Getter is powered by an L67 3800" -
333WHP
12.900 @ 109.91mph 2.166 60Ft (Fastest 1/4)
13.374 @ 110.01mph 2.467 60Ft (Fastest Trap)
2004 Chevy Cavalier - 15.7 @ 90mph (Semi-Modded)
Michael Dougherty wrote:Also I might as well ask where did you wind up buying the steel braided lines like that? I normally can only find them i kits pre-made for certain cars from like Russel or Goodridge
This*
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~Using nitrous is like having sex with a hot chick with an STD, you wanna hit it, but your afraid of the consequences.~
The brake lines are from the same manufacturer that was posted in the brake line thread:
http://stores.ebay.com/Silverstone-Modification-N-Racing?_trksid=p4340.l2563
All I did was order up a full set for the Sunbird which included the front caliper ones and the rear trailing arm ones which then connected up to some steel lines I bought and bended myself to reach the Saturn lines which I also got from the same place. The factory hard lines on the axle of the J-body are way too long to have a clean install.
I'll get pictures of the complete install when possible.
1993 Pontiac Sunbird 3400V6
Mike wrote:Michael Dougherty wrote:Also I might as well ask where did you wind up buying the steel braided lines like that? I normally can only find them i kits pre-made for certain cars from like Russel or Goodridge
This*
Pegasus Auto Racing. There are also other places out there that sell custom hose assemblies. You just need to look around.
.
Thanks a lot guys, I just orders mine tonight.
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~Using nitrous is like having sex with a hot chick with an STD, you wanna hit it, but your afraid of the consequences.~
Nine months later.... I want to share the completion of this brake swap. Finally!!!! Since the last post of pictures, the only thing holding the completion of this swap back was the routing of the brake lines, both hard lines and parking brake lines. The final routing of the hard lines was much easier than I initially thought. In my original post, I planned on buying new lines and route them following the factory parking brake routing but I ended up just cutting the factory lines shorter, re-flaring them and pulling a bracket off another 2nd gen to mount it on the axle. It turned out much cleaner(almost like it was supposed to be there) with more support for the hard lines. These brakes have been through 3000kms of driving or so and they have been absolutely great! I get much more modulation with the pedal and the car stops more linear than it did with the drums BUT it does seem like there is even more bias to the front brakes.
The one thing that held this swap back was the parking brake, which wasn’t as bolt on as it is on the third gens. After a few dangerous months of experimentation, it turns out the modifications needed to get them to work isn’t as intensive as I would have thought. The only other additional parts you need apart from the obvious are part numbers BC93735 and BC95029(slightly longer parking brake cables), a drill and an angle grinder.
How the cable bracket is positioned on the caliper makes it impossible to run a cable through as it faces directly to the shock absorber with a bias going towards the center of the car. Even if the bracket could be bent to get more of an angle, the cable cannot run on the inside of the shock absorber as it then runs into the spring. The reason why this isn’t an issue on the third gens is because their rear suspension has a strut setup so there is no spring in the way and the mounting point of that strut to the axle is closer to the outside of the car so the cable easily clears the inside of the strut.
You can see in the picture that the bracket will actually smash into the shock absorber when a big bump is hit in its factory position leaving that nasty dent and subsequent scrapes (I'll be replacing these ASAP).
What I did to fix this issue was cut the brackets down so that the cable can be routed around the outside of the shock. There is already a smaller hole on the bracket so I used that as a pilot and cut off enough so that there is the same amount of metal behind the new hole as there was on the original. Then I flipped the brackets around so that the slight angle on the ends of the brackets positions the cable away from the shock.
This leads to TWO problems that lead to one result, much more effort is needed to apply the parking brake. The combination of the cable ends not sitting strait with the movement of the parking brake when applied and the loss of leverage of the shorter arm makes pulling the handle more difficult to get the same amount of clamping strength from the pads. I will admit that the parking brake now feels a lot spongier than it did with the drums but they work 100%.
Thanks again for everything Jeffie!
1993 Pontiac Sunbird 3400V6
So is their a place that shows a complete list of what is used and needed to make this set up complete...
