Wilwood D52 brake calipers with cragar rims

by cutlassguy Thu Aug 20, 2015 10:58 am

Hey guys,
I recently installed the dual piston D52 wilwood callipers on my 76 olds. The install was OK, however the fittings supplied were terrible. Not sure if any other members have installed these.
Just a heads up if not, The supplied calliper fittings are very small with about 1/2 of thread going into the calliper. So when installing this fitting by hand only I stripped the first 5 threads of the calliper. So therefore I could not use the wilwood flex hoses I purchased separately.
I ended up using the factory flex hoses which worked out well to catch the deeper threads on the calliper.
Also I had to file the top front radius on the calliper ( approx 1/2 rad ) to clear the inside of the cragar rims on my car. I also had to remove the inside stick on wheel weights and rebalance the tires.
Hope this helps those who are thinking about purchasing the Wilwood D52 aluminium dual Piston Callipers.
If any other members have been running these callipers for some time now, please chime in and let me know
Thanks
Eric

by Joe73 Thu Aug 20, 2015 11:07 am

If the widwood hoses were stainless I'd try to use them or return them for another set. Or maybe call widwood and ask them about the problem.

Reason being, using stainless braided lines on the front and rear makes for a noticeable shorter stopping distance. I always do that upgrade to my towing vehicles. Stainless lines dont swell under high pressure like stock hoses. So more pressure goes to the caliper.

by thatfnthing Thu Aug 20, 2015 11:17 am

Interesting info, I was thinking of trying those myself. The clearance won't be a problem for me since I'm running 17" wheels, but the thread issue really bothers me.

by cutlassguy Thu Aug 20, 2015 12:05 pm

Joe73 wrote:If the widwood hoses were stainless I'd try to use them or return them for another set. Or maybe call widwood and ask them about the problem.

Reason being, using stainless braided lines on the front and rear makes for a noticeable shorter stopping distance. I always do that upgrade to my towing vehicles. Stainless lines dont swell under high pressure like stock hoses. So more pressure goes to the caliper.

The reason I cannot use the Wilwood stainless braided lines is because you need to use the fittings supplied with the lines / callipers, unfortunately the brass fittings have very short thread that go into the callipers.
When I read the reviews I was under the impression the factory flex hoses would not fit with these callipers, so I purchased the wilwood lines. Good thing the factory flex hoses had longer threading or I would be either time serting the threads or using helicoils at the time of install. That would have sucked!
I haven't had the time to look for different fittings with longer threads, However when I get time I will definitely be installing the new lines with better fittings.
Otherwise these callipers look great and perform well even with the factory flex lines.
As for the rims, I'm running cragar 14x7's on the front with 235 60 14's the interference wasn't that bad, I cleared more of a radius than needed.
Thatfnthing..... I would imagine the 17's would clear no problem, The fittings supplied however I'm sure would be a problem but I wouldn't let that detour you from purchasing them, the weight difference alone was worth the swap in my case.

Hope this helps,
Eric

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