Obviously, there are lots of rotors out there, with different specs. Several people have done disc swaps, which required grinding down their hubs, and are successful so far. I've even come across one person that ground the front of the hub down so he could use the dodge rotor listed before.



Sterling hub ground to fit 80's dodge rotor from the front Dodge rotor installed with GLO bracket No spacer needed with bracket on front of flange

As stated, most rotors are designed to press in to the back of the rotor, except for the newer, rotors, which are designed to use a drum style parking brake with disc brakes. These are found on late model trucks and vans. Since Ford went metric on their trucks, I was relegated to Ford Vans (which use a Dana 61 rear axle) and Chevy stuff. I couldn't find much info on Dodge trucks, and know very little about them. Of the rotors I listed above, the new Chevy rotor slid over the outside of the hub, but had a small gap around the hub, which gave it some room to float around and put all the weight bearing onto the studs. I didn't like that, and felt it would be hard on the studs. I tried the Van rotor, based on some info from Traveler (from various sites), and it fit like a glove. The Sterling hub even has a small flange the rotor sits on, which locates the rotor both hub centrically, as well as lug-centric, thus giving the best of both worlds.

Back of van rotor. Note the chamfer on the inside as opposed to the outside of the chevy rotor. -------------->
Flange/chamfer on the front of the sterling hub. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------->

So now I knew which rotor I wanted to use, it was time to get to some brackets that would work. As I mentioned, the GLO brackets are designed to use a 12.5 rotor, such that when you tried using a 12.83 van rotor the bracket sat up off the mounting holes by about .5”, and there was no way to modify them for use. I looked at using a spacer that would shim the bracket up which I would weld the GLO bracket to, but, that make bolting the brackets on quite difficult and there wouldn't be much room to weld the brackets together. The other issue with these bolt on caliper brackets is that I rotated the pinion up when I welded on the spring perches for my application, and the caliper bolts on the Chevy calipers would hit the springs. This would not allow me to either install or remove the calipers (obvious problem here) without removing the whole bracket. However, if you are using stock location spring perches, the bolt on ones would work fine for you.

I tried some 10 dollar caliper brackets from AA manufacturing, based on a suggestion from a buddy who used them on his 60 rear.

<------------------------- AA bracket on the right of mine

 

The AA brackets are made from 1/4 metal and are designed to weld on. They too, however, were too short for me. I looked at sectioning them by cutting them crosswise, and then adding some plate between them to make them taller, but this also wasn't the “right” way to do it for my son.

So, in the end, I bought a Mi-Tech plasma cutter from Dustball for about the same as the TSM brake kit would be, traced the GLO brackets, adding some height for the taller rotor, and cut my own brackets. I thought about trying to make a bolt on bracket, and the ones I made would have worked in this application, but again, I would have either had caliper bolt clearance issues with the leaves, or the caliper would be on the bottom of the rotor, and exposed to rocks.

Another shot of my bracket next to GLO brackets

 

 

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