[DeTomaso] Stock brake calibers & other musings

[eb0711 at kolumbus.fi]

I rebuilt my stock front brake calibers recently and took them fully 
apart while on that. I'm sure many know, but thought I'd share for the 
benefit of other newbies:

- Calibers seem like a decently nice design with big and little pistons, 
with some oddities in fluid distribution by strange tubing arrangement.
- Outer pistons are individually at a dead end, meaning the fluid will 
not change there, when you bleed them just for changing the fluid. Would 
really need to squeeze the outer pistons to the bottom to get most of 
the old fluid out from there.
- Changing rotors it's important to have the rotor and hub mounting 
surfaces very clean and make sure the rotor is perfectly seated against 
the hub. Otherwise the rotor will wobble and grab the pads at some point 
of rotation. Easy to be sloppy here. :)
- Only way to use thicker ventilated rotors with stock calibers would be 
to build a spacer to fit between caliber halves and use longer bolts. I 
wonder if someone already makes them?
- Noticed also that the Porterfield pads have 1mm thicker (~20%) steel 
backing plates than stock pads. So it's not just the compound, but 
stiffness and (maybe?) heat handling improvement.

-Janne