| | | quote | | Originally posted by KRMFiero: How much? Im just looking at there drop spindles.... |
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$500 shipped. (cost to me: $2000 shipped)
I must warn you, however, of the problems with the 88 Held kit.
1. The kit mounts the wheel 1/4 inch farther out, increasing scrub radius and steering effort. This will also put your wheel farther out of the well unless you compensate for it with a drastically high offset wheel of 50mm or greater.
2. The kit does not supply centering rings for the rotors. The Held brothers and the new owner told me this was normal. However, the rotor causes extreme vibrations at 65mph or higher.
3. The kit does not place the brake pads fully on the rotors. There is over 1/4 inch of overhang where the pads will never wear. If you look at ltlfrari's web site, you can see the same thing. The various owners insisted to me that this was perfectly normal and safe. Wilwood disagrees.
4. The castle nuts on the ball joints and the tie rod ends do not line up with the cotter-pin holes on the stem. This allows the castle nuts to un-torque and create an extremely dangerous situation. At first, it was thought that my holes in the spindle were over-bored, as Held has had problems with that in the past, but the holes are the same size as my stock knuckles. There is just significantly less thick material through which the hole is bored. The new owner suggested that I fix it with washers.... yeah, right. It would have taken 3 washers, each custom fitted, per joint....
5. Spindle quality was terrible. The welds look strong, but very "unclean". There was metal slag left all over the spindle, and it was obviously not prepped before powder-coating. The powder-coat started chipping the second it came out of the box.
6. The kit advertises that it does away with the rare 88 hub in favor of the much more readily available hub from the rear of the fiero. It was never mentioned to me that the new hub would have a huge bolt welded through the center of it to satisfy the preload requirements. Once you see the immense amount of welding that occurs at the bearing, you have to wonder about what impact it has on the greased bearings just inside. The first set of hubs I had were defective to the point of being able to grasp them like a clamshell and pry the front and back of the bearing apart just enough so that alignment was utterly impossible.
7. The 4 piston wilwood calipers stick outboard nearly 1.5 inches more than the outboard side of the stock calipers. Even though I was aware of the potential problem, and bought wheels with enormous amounts of clearance, it just wasn't enough. I had to buy wheel spacers to move the wheels out enough to clear the caliper. This magnified the problems of #1 above.
8. Contrary to popular belief on this forum, unless you buy stiffer springs or get bigger bumpstops, you WILL rub with 1.5 inch drop spindles. Not always, but anything performance will do it. You have the same amount of travel as stock with less wheel-well room.
9. The big-bore cylinder that comes with the kit is oversized for the front-only application, causing the pedal to be horribly stiff and requiring vast amounts of strength to move the pedal the 1/2 inch it takes to get the car to stop. See theogre's cave for an article that outlines how this can happen, although it does not give specs on this specific system.
10. The big-bore cylinder that comes with the kit is so large that you cannot get the spare tire in or out of the front anymore. The tire won't fit between the cylinder and the bracket for the jack. Before I figured out all of the reasons I was hosed with this system, I was able to solve this problem by trimming a major portion of the bracket off.
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Well, that's the top-ten list anyway. There was a lot more wrong, but I think mostly everything else was communication/service related. Needless to say, Held Motorsports was unwilling to make it right.
If you are still interested (I highly doubt it, but you [i]might[/] be crazy) There are a pair of absolutely wonderful Wilwood Dynalite II calipers just sitting there, with nice stainless steel earls brake lines attached. Nice pair of cross-drilled & slotted rotors, too. Not sure how you'd be able to use them (Since the spindles themselves are KAY ARE AAY PEE), but if anybody here knows how to fab the right parts, I'm sure they could be made to fit...
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