UUC Big Brake Kit

Summary

Performance front brakes for quicker braking and reduced brake fade.

Start Date: April 25, 2012

Odometer: 307600 km

Total cost: $1773.84

In late 2011 I installed a custom Wilwood big brake kit on my 318is. I had salvaged the kit from my previous E30, which was written off in turn 10 at Mosport. The Wilwood driver's-side rotor proved to be warped, causing significant steering wheel shimmy. The calipers were fine, but the rotors were unusable and needed replacement. Unfortunately, the rotor hats had been custom machined, and were no longer available. I asked Lee at Massive brakes if he could make a new hat so that I could buy new matching rotors and keep the Wilwood Dynalite calipers. Lee, however, did not want to mix his rotor hats with the Dynalite product, which he felt was poor quality (for the record they had always felt great to me). So I was stuck with calipers for rotors that I could not replace quickly enough to get the car on the track for the first event of the season. I, therefore, decided to replace the entire brake setup with a known quantity that supports readily available replacement parts for all consumable components: UUC's Big Brake Kit for E30s.

Parts

Alternative source for brake pads: www.raceshopper.com.

Alternative front brake pads: Wilwood 7212.

Journal

While the UUC brakes did turn out to be amazing, I ran into some fitment issues. The first was minor: one of the caliper bolts didn't fit through the caliper, and could only be installed by threading it into the caliper housing:

A much more severe fitment issue was the calipers' failure to fit under my 15" rims. UUC claims that the Big Brake Kit provides "ultra-low clearance [that] means no spacers for some of the most popular 15" race wheels such as the D-Force LTW 15x7." Unfortunately, however, that claim proved to not be true in my case. On my car, the calipers do not fit under my D-Force 15x7 rims, as shown below:

Close-up of the caliper contacting the D-Force rim:

Given that the calipers didn't fit under my D-Force rims, I was forced to use my older Kazera KZ-M rims, which do (just barely) fit over the calipers. Clearance is less than a millimetre, and there is some rubbing under heavy braking, which is not ideal, but they do work.

Here's the kit prior to installation (click to enlarge). I added extra lines and brake pads to the order.

The brakes installed:

The Result

Pros:

Superb performance: extremely predictable, high powered braking
Smooth, stable delivery. They feel twitchy until you become accustomed to the power, then they become extremely subtle and controllable.
Absolutely zero brake fade, even with no brake ducts, and after three 32-degree celcius summer days at a long, high-speed track with very aggressive braking zones (Calabogie)
Extremely convenient brake pad replacement (loosen one nut and an allen key)

Cons

Very poor caliper clearance under 15" rims (on the set I installed)

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