- If your stop breaks can clamp hard enough to do this.
(car breaks screeching)
Then what is the point of big break?
So today we're gonna be installing this big brake kit
on the Miata and along the way,
we'll talk about what a big brake kit is even about
and whether or not they're worth it.
In most cases, probably not gonna be worth it,
but we'll talk about that later.
I'm Zach, this is Money Pit, let's slow down.
(boom)
- Four million subs, thank you guys so much,
whether it's showing up in the comments.
- Or the subreddit.
- Or on social media.
- It means the world seeing you guys take part
in our community.
- To celebrate this monumentous occasion
and to say thank you to you guys.
We have made this commemorative four million sub sticker.
- It's not for people who come for five it's for you guys,
the fantastic four million.
- And we're only gonna make as many as we sell.
So they're never gonna make it again.
Once they're done, they're done.
- This bad guy is proof that you are here right now.
- So again, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Donut is only Donut because of people like you
and I can't thank you enough.
One more time.
- Now go buy a sticker, man.
(upbeat music)
- [Eddie] He's hurt and boys and girls.
- I slept weird, take me out of commission.
Look, I know y'all want an excuse to get big breaks.
And I know you probably got a little scared when I said
that they might not be worth it,
but you know, we got to talk about it.
And then eventually we'll talk about when they are worth it,
because obviously sometimes they are.
So your OEM brakes are designed to stop your car during
normal driving without making any noise
without making too much dust while lasting a long time
and costing relatively little to produce.
So that's just to say that they're not very fancy.
It's not to say that they're not powerful
because basically all of you with a working vehicle
could go get in it right now, go down the road,
slam on the brakes and lock up your front tires,
which means that they're powerful enough.
So then the question is why do they feel so bad?
And the answer is there could be a lot of answers,
could be as simple as having some air in your lines
and you need to bleed out the air.
Your fluid could just be old as well.
Brake fluid is hygroscopic, which means it absorbs water
and water makes terrible brake fluid.
So after a while, your brake fluid absorbs enough water
that it needs to be changed.
You should change it once a year.
So if you haven't done that,
do it and use a good brake fluid,
one that meets your OEM specs or potentially exceeds.
(metals crashing)
And probably most importantly, your brake pads,
different pads will have different characteristics,
which means your brakes will feel differently depending on
which kind of brake pad you're running.
Let me show you what we're gonna be running in our new kit.
(upbeat music)
So these are the pads that we selected to run with the kit
that we're installing on the Miata.
These are a semi-metallic kind of pad.
And that generally means that there's about 30 to 65%
of the pads compound is metal and the rest is
whatever they use to bind the metal together.
There are also organic pads,
but those tend to wear out a lot quicker
and make dust and noise.
And then there are also what are probably overall the best
pads, which are ceramics.
They're great at dealing with heat.
They're not very noisy.
They last forever,
although they are a little bit more expensive.
So Wilwoods got this nice BP-10 compound.
That's what we're gonna be normally running on the Miata.
And then when we do a heavy track day,
we'll swap in some track pads.
We should take a look at Wilwoods website,
so you can see what I'm talking about.
You can see what you would look at if you were shopping
for pads.
Okay, so here we've got the page for the pad
that we've got here
and the peak temperature rating is
eight to 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
We've got some specs
and then we've got performance characteristics,
medium friction, smooth engagement,
low abrasion on iron rotors so that means
that it's not just gonna chew through your rotors.
So it sounds like a pretty tame durable pad
that isn't gonna crush through our rotors,
and isn't gonna be noisy or hard to get up to temperature.
It has great friction at low temperatures,
and it starts to fall off around 900 degrees.
The issue can be that a pad that can deal
with higher temperatures,
sometimes isn't as effective at lower temperatures.
So that's one of the reasons you won't run the most
aggressive pad you can because sometimes you gotta get those
pads up to temperature and it can be scary
if you press the big brake pedal,
as soon as you get in the car and not that much happens.
So this is a good temperature range for our daily brake pad.
And then we'll probably want to step up to one of these pads
that allows us to get a little hotter for our track pad.
So if you're shopping for pads,
spend some time on a page like this, do some reading,
understand what the differences are and understand
what you need and you'll have a selection in no time.
(upbeat music)
So our brake rotor upgrade is this Wilwood two-piece rotor
that came in the kit from Flyin' Miata
because it was the best rotor they could find.
So these rotors are a two piece.
I still have to put them together,
and that's great because obviously we get
this strong iron ring,
but then we get to save some weight by using aluminum
for the center.
So put these together
and they should look pretty awesome too.
Now let's talk about the design
because there are some different rotor designs
if you're out there shopping,
you've probably seen cross drilled and slotted rotors.
Drilled rotors aimed to increase cooling of the rotor
by increasing air flow and they can look cool
and they can do their job in terms of cooling.
The problem is in practice, most drilled brake rotors
that I see in real life end up cracking.
I'm not a big fan of drilled rotors,
but if you're gonna go with drilled rotors,
you got to spend the big bucks and get the good stuff.
Now, slotted rotors don't really come with any downsides,
but their job is a little bit different.
They don't intend to cool the rotor.
They intend to basically clean the brake pad.
So these slots wipe clean the surface
of the brake pad from any debris, any gas, any dust,
any build up to try to keep the pad
to rotor contact pure and clean
and keep your brakes as good as they can possibly be.
But, neither of those things are too terribly important
drilled or slotted rotors, the real important part is
that you get a nice quality material
that can withstand your brake pads and won't warp.
All right, so let's say you've done all these things.
You've done braided stainless brake lines.
You've done really nice pads and rotors
while your brakes probably feel pretty good.
However, if you're really out there driving,
you're doing hard track days, road racing,
or really pushing it in the canyons
and pushing a lot of heat into your brakes,
that still might not be enough.
You still might be overheating your brakes.
And that's really what it all boils down to.
So that's why I got all of this.
So I got a four wheel big brake kit from Flyin' Miata
and I am psyched.
This thing is gonna be sick,
got Wilwood calipers in all four corners.
and of course they're red, so they're gonna look awesome,
and also got some anodized purple brackets.
I love purple anodized stuff that's just a fact.
So we've got our red calipers, our purple brackets.
We got two piece rotors, we got some nice daily pads,
we got stainless lines
and we even have a brake proportioning valve.
So I can control how much power goes to the front
and to the rear respectively in terms of braking.
Honestly, this is just gonna be fantastic.
Okay, this is the other thing.
Big breaks, even if you don't need them are sweet.
You know, when you see a car with a big brake kit,
you know that guy knows what's up.
So hopefully these big fat rotors
and pretty sweet pads will keep us
from ever experiencing brake pad fade.
Good Lord, I feel like I've been talking all morning.
Why don't we just go over there
and start installing some stuff.
(upbeat slow music)
Anytime you're getting new rotors,
whether they're performance rotors,
or just OEM replacements,
they'll be shipped with a light coating of oil on them
to keep them from corroding.
You gotta clean that off.
So as you can see the new brakes aren't way bigger.
And honestly, they feel like they weigh about the same,
because this is a two piece with aluminum.
The point of this is that you don't want to add a bunch
of unsprung weight to your car
that can just make it handle a lot worse,
make it accelerate slower,
and then make it feel a lot worse.
And that's not what we want for the Miata, obviously.
So I want a compromise.
I want the best of both worlds.
I want a lot of braking,
I want a lot of heat capacity in my brakes,
but I don't want them to weigh a bunch.
So that's why this is such a good kit.
It's the right size.
It's not overkill, it's the correct kill.
You know what I mean?
Got a little spacer here.
(upbeat music)
All right, the caliper bracket fits everything looks good.
There's no clearance issues or anything like that.
So now I'm gonna go ahead
and put some Lock tight on the bolts, put them back in,
tighten them down and we'll put the rotor
and caliper in place.
Hook the line up and then this corner is pretty much done
aside from bleeding, but that's later.
Let's go get a caliper.
All right, we're ready to put our caliper on.
I've got my hardware here.
The most thing here is the use of the included shims.
So the idea is that when we mount the caliper,
we want to make sure that the caliper in this way is
centered to the rotor is centered inside the caliper.
So it's recommended to start with two shims,
but you always got to check and go from there.
Make sure you got it right.
So we'll measure and make sure this thing
is nicely centered up.
Oh, it looks pretty centered.
Ah, that's saying it looks pretty centered.
I've gotten this casting line on this spacer in the caliper
that I can just kind of line up with the center
of the rotor and it looks like it falls dead on it.
I mean, I'll measure it anyway, just to be sure,
but by my eyeball, we're in good shape.
So we've got a nice new stainless braided brake lines.
They're awesome, they won't flex under pressure
and they should last a long time,
as long as we route them right?
When you do install a set of these,
you have to make sure that they don't rub anything
throughout the steering swing
or throughout the suspension travel.
If these are rubbing, they will cut through.
So make sure they're not rubbing on anything.
All right, so we're gonna go ahead
and drop our new pads into these rotors and in doing so,
I'll show you how easy it is to change pads on these.
So you can see just how realistic it is
to actually have track day pads and even weekend pads,
you know, Tuesday pads, whatever it is.
Put a little bit of grease on the back of my pads,
where the pistons hit him just to make sure things stay nice
and quiet.
Okay, pads, just gonna drop down in,
I like it so obviously friction material facing the rotor
on both sides.
(chuckles)
That was good.
And another thing to look for is your like wheel weights.
If you have stick on wheel weights,
sometimes those can clip your caliper.
So give it a spin.
Ours are close, but not that close.
That's gonna be just fine in terms of our caliper.
Now I'm gonna get under there and look at our brake line.
(upbeat music)
Sometimes your rotors will be kind of corroded in place
when that's the case, big hammer will be your friend,
but before you go slamming the hammer on a car,
that's on jack stands.
You gotta make sure it's nicely supported.
(upbeat music) (hammering)
Everything on the rear is pretty much the same as the front.
Although some of it looks a little different,
but we're just taking off the calipers, taken off the rotor.
We're gonna move the heat shield.
We do have to trim this heat shield a little bit to clear
our new brackets.
Although we are gonna have to install parking brakes,
that'll be different, but we haven't gotten there yet.
So our brake rotors on the rear, you see are solid.
And usually the rear brakes do a lot less of the work on a
car than the front brakes.
And on the Miata that's especially true.
People say that the rear brakes basically do nothing.
And that's a big reason that Flyin' Miata includes
that proportioning valve that will install.
That'll allow me to control the bias
and control how much braking goes to the rear.
(upbeat music)
Beautiful line routing, yeah.
Our wheels shouldn't make any contact with the brake line.
We obviously don't need to worry about
the rear wheel steering.
We do need to worry about suspension a little bit.
Though this looks like it's gonna be just great.
So cool, all right.
So the game plan for the parking brake is
to get these stock parking brake cables out,
and then there'll be replaced by said that work
with the Wilwoods.
Cable will come up and it'll kind
of follow the original cables routing.
It would get to the caliper
and then I have to install a little lever arm
that'll just kind of squeeze.
It sounds like it's not gonna be the best parking brake,
but
technically be a parking brake,
Man, I can't wait for the day
when we build our own shop.
- And have loops and stuff?
- You know, it's not that I don't like working like this,
but sure would be nice.
Yeah, okay.
So the cables are finally attached to the balance bar,
which was a bit of a battle I will not lie.
But battle's won, they are on.
Now, the only thing is left
to route them mountain to the chassis
and then mount them to the e-brake.
But I got I'm telling ya.
I think I'm gonna do that in the morning,
out of respect for my neighbor.
(upbeat music)
All right, we're back at it.
Another beautiful day.
We don't have that much left to do it should be a pretty
smooth day I hope.
Of course I'm here.
I've had to take the rear calipers back off
to install the parking brake arms.
I guess I would have known that I should have done
that first had I read the instructions,
but at times like these,
that I'm reminded of my old family motto,
the old job motto it it's not done twice.
It's not done, right.
So I guess we might as well just do it again
and then things will be okay.
(upbeat music)
All right, so our parking brake cables completely hung
and our parking brakes installed into the caliper.
It's basically just two arms and this cable,
when you pull the handle, pulls these two arms together
and clamps the pads down on the rotor, you know,
just stop it from spinning.
So should be pretty simple, should work okay.
The big question is whether
or not this is all gonna fit under the wheel.
Oh yeah, baby.
It's close, but we're gonna be just fine.
Now we gonna go do the same thing to the other side.
All right, so yesterday to help me get
the parking brake installed,
I loosened the adjustment here at the handbrake.
There's just a nut with a slot in the top
that you tighten or loosen,
depending whether you want to tighten or loosen the cable
to the e-brake not bad, we'll call that an adjustment
for now, we might need to find and tune it
once we get the car back on the ground,
but for now that's good.
So that's gonna wrap up the rears.
We can put the wheels back on and then it's good to have
that proportioning valve and then bleed this thing
and go drive it.
So by installing this valve,
I'll be able to control how much power it goes
to the rear brakes,
and I'll be able to make them do a lot more work,
which should help the Miata
to slow down a little bit quicker.
So this right here is our stock distribution block,
goes from the master cylinder to the front and rear brakes.
So we're gonna be replacing that this is the front line,
which will be replaced with just a straight through.
And then over here, we'll place the pass through
to the rear with this proportioning valve.
So we can dial in how much power the rear gets in terms
of breaking.
Now that's in there nice and tight.
Hopefully we don't have any leaks.
We will have to check,
but now we should be good to fill this thing up with fluid
and start bleeding it.
Exciting times.
Now, when you do bleed brakes,
you usually wanna start at the corner farthest away
from the car.
So we'll be starting at the passenger rear.
Okay, here's an interesting part about these.
These calipers have inboard and outboard calipers.
So you've got them on both sides.
So if you've got something like that going on,
you're gonna want to bleed the inboard first
and then the outboard closest to the master
and then furthest.
So you're gonna go ahead
and put your line on your bleeder.
Like, so then your wrench on your bleeder
and then have whoever's in the driver's seat,
press the brake pedal a few times,
three times, five times, eight times,
put some pressure into the system
and then hold the pedal down.
And then he'll tell you that he's holding the pedal down.
Like Eddie tells me.
- [Eddie] Hold.
- And then when the pedal is being held down,
you crack the bleeder and let that pressure and air out.
And you do that enough times until you're only getting fluid
out nowhere and then move on, keep going until you're done.
(upbeat music)
Alright, so that pretty much wraps up the install
of our sick new Flyin' Miata of big brake kit on the Miata.
So now we've got to put the wheels back on,
get it on the ground and take it for a test drive
and make sure this thing actually stops itself.
And then once it does we'll bed these pads in
and that's it baby.
Then we're home free.
All right, the good news is the brake stop us
from a slight roll.
That's the first thing you're always gonna wanna check,
you know, make sure they work at least this much.
And that e-brake feels pretty decent.
Let's see if it'll stop us from rolling.
Almost, yay we stopped.
All right, enough, can we go drive?
Let's go drive.
All right, so the plan right now is to get out,
drive around and get the brake pads warm,
get them just nice and warm, then get them good and hot,
and then cool them down.
We got to brake them in.
We got to give them that nice heat cycle
to get them a good for a long life of service.
It's also important when you get them good and hot,
once you park the car, if they're still hot,
don't put your e-brake on.
Don't make the pads touch the rotors because then they can,
they can warp your rotor.
(car speeding)
See, so you wanna go just until you hit ABS or lockup.
You don't want to be locking up your brakes
on brake bedding.
(car speeding)
Oh yeah baby, oh yeah they're feeling great.
Smelling good too.
(car speeding)
Woo.
(car speed accelerating)
People are like, what in the hell is this boy doing?
If you're not happy with the way you break pedal feels
and you want it to feel better
you even warm a little better stopping power, yeah,
a big brake kit can do that for sure.
But the point that I'm making is that you don't need to go
with the big brake kit to get those things.
You can get great pedal feel and great stopping power,
just out of doing a good pair of pads and rotors,
a good set of stainless brake lines
and some good brake fluid.
If you do those things, your brakes will feel better.
Now, if you're still not happy enough with how they feel
and if you're still overheating, then yes,
a big brake kit is worth it.
Then that is the road you need to go down
like the one I just went down.
So with that said, thank you guys so much for watching.
Let me know in the comments below
what you guys think about big breaks.
Let's have a conversation about it.
In the meantime, you can follow me on Instagram @Zachjobe.
Follow Donut @donutmedia,
and I'll see you guys next week.