Classic Car Restoration: Disc Brake Overview

We're going to do a disk break up grade on a 1957 De Soto Fireflight. Disk break upgrades for this era of car are pretty common. The reason is, is the engines and the performance of this era of car, is it started to excide the breaking capacity of the car. Breaking technology didn't evolve as quickly as the engine performance themselves. For our project we picked a SSBC kit.

Mainly because they actually work with a 14 inch wheel that these cars were designed with. That's a little unusual because a lot of break upgrade kits will want you to upgrade the wheels to 15 inch. So it's kind of neat that they can actually still use the factory wheels, factory wheel covers. One of things I really like about this kit, is the four piston design front caliper. This allows even clamping portions on both sides of the rotor, and is more of a performance kind of design because the front calipers represent 70% of our stopping force of our break system.

This will insure that our car will be able to stop once it's on. The back caliper system is often a place where guys over look. Because the front breaking system is a big huge part of your breaking. A lot of guys will shortcut and not do the rear disk break conversion. However, should you loose your front breaks you got to remember your rears suddenly become 100% of you stopping power.

The SSBC kit includes the one piston, rear break caliper, but it also incorporates a emergency break lever. Which is a upgrade from where we were at. The reason is, the 57 De Soto the emergency breaks were operated off the driveshaft. So as you can see the disk break kits from SSBC include everything you're going to need to get the job done. The mounting brackets, the bolts, all the hardware, the rotor, and the dust shield.

So with that, let's get started.