Total Price: £672

Every since taking a trip to the Nurburgring in May 2007 I have been considering upgrading the brakes on the Rallye for something a little more potent as eventually I plan on getting a new car and the Rallye will become my toy

I had looked at many options at the time and after seeing Mike’s (Cosmic Spanner) Brembos and Mile’s AP Racing setup on his Rallye in Germany I was in love Sadly the price of the darn AP things gave me a slap in the face Back to the drawing board I decided to take a punt on a set of Fiat Coupe Brembos with brackets to fit on the 306 along with some 406 Coupe discs. To my amazement these actually fitted, although to get sufficient clearance I would have needed some spacers around 5mm Before fitting I had planned to refurb these badboys and get some stainless pistons put in at the same time Well I got as far as stripping down both calipers completely ready for painting when I got a little sidetracked by the purchase of a house, bricks and mortar aren’t really my thing but hey this beastly house was gonna eat my weekends for the next year or so So things were left there and the preliminary brake concept slept in the loft for a bit

Fast forward to around May this year and I was starting to get a little bit of non DIY time available to me, time for a project I thought I had at the time followed Rich W’s radial mounted Brembo upgrade and it triggered a little alarm in my head, I knew of the parts involved in the radial AP Racing kit for the 306 and I knew of the costs involved but what if I could get my hands on a set of said AP calipers and go about developing a fairly cheap to build / cheap to run kit, easier said than done I thought but hey what the hell I don’t see anyone else doing an AP Racing setup on a budget So off I set…… with a measly sum of £600 as my budget

First things first I was going to have to get my hands on a set of AP Racing CP5200 calipers. These are the calipers used in their kit for the 306 and the piston sizes are perfect for our cars Now doing my research it was obvious these calipers were used for many different applications so I thought it shouldn’t be too hard to find some Sadly it was quite the opposite, nobody wants to part with these calipers as they are so god damn good However after a few unsuccessful bids on ebay when they did appear for sale I received a chance email from a seller that had been messed around by a buyer, as I had shown an interest prior he ask me to make him an offer, £300 later and I had snapped them up Now at the time these chaps were mated to some steel brackets ready for a Volvo S70, it became apparent to me then that I had some work to do



The kit that AP Racing produce for the 306 is comprises of a 315mm x 28mm disc and is designed to fit under 16” wheels. I briefly considered purchasing the remainder of the kit from AP Racing so that I could get everything together but when I totalled up the cost it came to a still rather expensive £1288.27 This clearly was not in the design brief I had set myself as these brakes needed to be good but affordable at the same time. I began looking into developing some brackets and disc mounting bells myself much like Ash has done with his Brembo 330mm kit but once I had totalled everything up it still blew my budget by some way I needed to make the most of what was available if I was going to make this work After Rich W’s sterling work I knew it was possible to fit some calipers along with the Peugeot 406 305mm discs under some 16” wheels so I had this as the back-up plan if there was not an easier option, it turned out for my budget and particular design brief this was about the only option

First things first I was going to have to make the calipers fit with the 305mm discs which would involve fabricating some sort of mounting bracket I had the spare 305mm discs lying around from the Brembo Kit in the loft so I dug them out and began to have a look. Now thankfully I kinda have an A-Level in graphical design (long story) so I knew how to design what I needed to be made up, it was just gonna be a case of getting all the correct measurements together, once again easier said than done. Thankfully the AP Racing website is spot on and I was able to get hold of some excellent technical drawings for the CP5200 calipers, as well as a lot of the measurements needed it also confirmed to me that the actual design of the caliper hadn’t really changed for quite some time so even though I had an older version than the current one there is no major difference between the two



By a stroke of luck I had a spare 306 hub sat in the shed so I dug this out and got busy with the ruler finding out all the measurements needed from that while at the same time taking crucial measurements from my alloys so that I could be certain the setup would fit with no issues. With these measurements I drew up some scale drawings of the hub mounting along with a scale drawing of the 305mm disc and another scale drawing of the caliper side profile. By cutting out these scale drawings I was able to piece them together like a puzzle to the required dimensions and in doing so retrieve some crucial dimensions needed for the caliper bracket. I then set about in a similar fashion with some top down drawings that enabled me to finalise the overall dimensions needed for the caliper bracket, with these in place I started work on my design

After a few hours busy with the pencil I had finished my rather simple design for some aluminium caliper mounting brackets. I have to thank Rich W here as the pics from his setup enabled me to visualise what the bracket should/would look like



I had decided like Rich to get some stainless helical inserts in the aluminium for securing the caliper to bracket bolts safely. All this information was provided on the drawing so in theory all that the engineer needed to do was get the materials and then do some number crunching on his CNC machine

The next step would be to find an engineer and get them made up, before that however I thought it would be prudent to go over my designs, thank god I did It turned out I had been a little hasty with one of the measurements and taken it from a drawing I believed to be to scale due to another measurement, however this was not true and the offset position of my caliper mounting holes was way out! I quickly set about amending the drawings and once I was happy I hadn’t made any further amateur mistakes I got on the blower to a few engineers/machinists After some telling me they didn’t deal with parts that they could be held liable for in the event of an accident (so that’s everything then ) I found a nice chap not too far from home who once he had seen the designs believed he could knock them up without too much trouble for £125 inc VAT. This was the sort of price I was looking for so it was all systems go I popped a check along with my finalised designs in the post and the next day they started work

While the brackets were being made I decided I should sort out the rest of the kit ready for installation:

A decent brakes kit is always going to need stainless steel hose so I picked up some from Miles on this site, they are superb quality and have all stainless fixings rather than zinc plated. To go with these (as they will be too short) I already had some copper extensions that I had brought for the Brembo setup, these came with stainless fixings too and were expertly knocked up by Phillip M (a.k.a MacGyver ). These cost £37 and £4 respectively if I remember correctly.



Now in order for the calipers to actually stop the car I was gonna need some sort of frictional resistance going on, it was decided new discs and pads would be the best solution

I had spent some time researching what kind of pads I wanted and had decided I wanted a set for high performance road use and occasional track work. For this particular caliper there is an almighty choice of pad compounds available from a huge number of manufacturers so I really did have all the choice in the world After a few days pondering I decided that some Pagid RS4-2 Blue’s were the choice for me One reason that I chose these is that there was a good supply of them on Ebay for a excellent price of around £60! The other reason was the feedback given from members of this site, all raved about the pads and said that if they were in the budget then these would be the ones to go for Cheers to all those that gave feedback in my thread



As for the discs I was left with a slight dilemma, do I go really cheap to stay in budget or do I go high end and blow it completely? It was decided that a compromise was best and a set of 406 Coupe Brembo Discs were picked up from GSF for roughly £99. I would put a pic up but I don’t have one right now and besides you all know what they look like

Right now the brackets are just being finished off and I am ordering up some AP Racing AP Formula Racing Brake Fluid Dot 5.1 for the new system. I was originally going to do this project thread when all was finished but then I thought it would be better to get your mouths watering first

So far the costs roughly look like this:

Calipers: £300
Brake Pads: £60
Brake Lines: £37
Brake Extensions: £4
Brake Discs: £99
Caliper Brackets: £125
Brake Fluid: £12 (estimate)

Total: £637

Not bad

I will keep this updated as and when

________________________________________

Just Drive It

immense mate, if only i had the balls to do something like this. Ive toyed with the idea of doing something similar with the ap calipers myself. £1500 is just way to expensive


Its justs the bracket dimensions etc and precision measuring i don't feel confident with.

I think you should design me a bracket to fit some of those calipers to some of compbrakes 330mm rotors.

im sure you could make some money on it

Cheers guys

A lot of the precision dimensions can be obtained from AP drawings so you are just left with the design part really, it does take quite a lot of thought power to get it all on paper though

Rich and Ash kinda inspired me to get going and actually do it, i guess it could all still go very wrong but im pretty confident everything will fit together once done

When finished im gonna have a chat to a few AP Racing suppliers and see what their prices are for a set of new calipers, that way it could be viable for others as right now it seems pretty hard to get hold of second hand ones

The main ethos behind the design was a performance brake setup that is affordable to look after so the discs might be a heavy option but they are easy to get and reasonably cheap. the good news is i can easily get some bells made up and increase the disc size at the same time in the future if need be, just need some shims from AP and away we go

________________________________________

Just Drive It

Superb thread Tom

________________________________________

Get used to seeing the yellow one !!!
Team 330™
Team "no front end or engine"
Team "LIMITED EDITION" I live for the 306 sticker
Team 0-60 in 6.44 & standing qtr in 14.808 @ 94.55mph all with std engine
203bhp Corolla T-Sport daily driver stealthier than Kwai Chang Caine

Good man, having done it myself it really is easy to do providing you have a good set of verniers and a few brain cell's.

Well done fella

________________________________________

Life is a lie. The only certainty of which is death. Go live and enjoy yourself. The clock is ticking

Vrs power!!

Cheers guys Have just worked out we must look like a right cheapo bunch to other forums, all we do is find ways to do things on a budget

Must say when i saw your brake setup Welly i was tempted just to buy one of your kits when finished but the fact that i was already well into this little project meant i had to carry on, yours do look like the perfect low cost upgrade

Hopefully pick the brackets up tonight

________________________________________

Just Drive It

If I'd known you could of copied my brackets from the proper AP kit! Looks like you've done a good job though!

I paid just shy of

________________________________________

Oulton Park in a BTCC 306 vid 1
Oulton Park in a BTCC 306 vid 2
Lap of the 'ring

Asked the chap at AP Racing as i thought the same as you and that's the answer he gave me Anyway im not too worried as you say as i only do max 5k miles per year and will be doing a few checks on them

Have an update now, just need to upload the pics....

________________________________________

Just Drive It

Excellent work, make sure you have clearance between the disc and wishbone balljoint, that was my first mistake, having originally designed the kit on a hub without the wishbone/balljoint connected. :fingerscrossed

Look really good, nice one! My set-up is more or less identical to that, and probably cost 3x as much! I am probably going to spacer my calipers out to suit 304mm discs instead of the 295mm one's I have at the moment, just need to check inner wheel clearance.

________________________________________

Oulton Park in a BTCC 306 vid 1
Oulton Park in a BTCC 306 vid 2
Lap of the 'ring

I run 15's, 304mm is the biggest that I have run under 15's but may have a look at 315mm, there was a bit of space left with the team dynamic wheels, 11mm bigger discs should only need another 6mm of clearance so it may be possible...

________________________________________

Oulton Park in a BTCC 306 vid 1
Oulton Park in a BTCC 306 vid 2
Lap of the 'ring