Cheers man! Absolutely, it's one of the coolest features of the car, along with it's amazingly well shaped rear end...MACK wrote:Nice, you do have to love that "power bulge" the coupes have in the roof!
Must resist the temptation to buy an 'M' bonnet...
Anyway... Brake line install...
So here we go! I decided to start at the rear, as these were likely to be the biggest pain to do...
Firstly, Clip removed at trailing arm mounting position, but old line all still installed.
New line installed at trailing arm mounting position, so far so good!
This point, I realised the flaw in the designs of the people who'd done these before. Had the rubber nut/circlip mount been installed the opposite way round on the hose, it'd have slipped straight through, with the fitting for the caliper, however as it was the wrong way round, this bracket had to be cut to allow the hose to pass through... (more on this later)
Hose installed at rear caliper position, showing the 'loop' under the drive shaft with good clearance
Comments regarding the original design - The overall length of the hose was slightly too long, and had to have a couple of cable ties installed to stop the hose slipping through the two rubber fittings into it's most comfortable position which left it slightly closer to a few things than I would have liked it to. With an overall length of 700mm, rather than 720mm and the 'small circlip nut' installed the opposite way around, these would have been miles easier to install!
This diagram is how I believe they would be best laid out...
Onto the fronts! These were really very straight forward and took 7 minutes per hose to install!
Here is a picture of it installed at the caliper end, with the rubber bung in the original position at the damper
and this one shows the usage of the original chassis mounting point
These are the leftovers!
Brake Bleeding...
As luck had it, myself and Mike (E46 M3) were working away on the hoses, when Kev (E46 330ci ClubSport) showed up! So we ended up doing probably the most foolproof type of brake bleeding!
Unfortunately I didn't take any pics of this as I drew the straw of sitting in the car pressing the pedal, Kev kept an eye on the fluid levels and Mike rolled around the floor with the catch bottle and brake nipple spanner.
Whilst installing the hoses, I noticed that the brake pipes were dripping fairly constantly throughout the job, so as I attached the new hoses at the hard pipe end, they were pretty much gravity bleeding themselves! This meant that by the time came for us to bleed everything up, the system actually bled up really quickly and with very little effort.
Overall we used 800ml of the ATE SuperBlue racing fluid and went round each caliper twice, working in order from the furthest away from the master cylinder, to the closest.
Road Test...
The bit where you're butt clenches when you first try the pedal - Nope! It was fine! I wouldn't say 'Rock Hard' like many people say after having braided lines, but then I'm not prone to exaggeration. The pedal was slightly firmer than it was previously and felt good!
At first, I slowly pulled the car out of the workshop and gently gave the brakes a couple of squeezes, I then drove around the works carpark just gently testing the brakes before going out onto some empty 30mph roads to do a bit of low speed braking. - All good, no issues!
I then took the car onto the bypass for a little more speed (luckily we were at Midnight, so my repeated braking / accelerating wasn't causing anyone a danger). I did some 60mph heavy stops to almost zero just to get a bit of heat into the brakes and make sure all was OK.
Conclusion...
I'd say it's been a good improvement! Hard to say what has actually improved, however noticeably stopped short of a roundabout and a set of lights and felt like I had a lot more say in what the brakes were doing. Very happy with the results and would recommend this to anybody looking to improve their brakes!