Had a scary little incident happen with my fairly new Focus SVT front brakes last night.
Driving 40 mph down a super busy 4 lane road. Hear a thud, sounds like a flat. Slow down and coast over. As I am pulling over, about 10 mph now, the car screeches and stops in the right lane. I put it in nuetral and jump out to look for visual damage...Nothing I could see. I first thought it was my diff due to previous MTX-75 failures (im on my soon to be 4th trans-x). Traffic died down and I needed to get my car off the road so I tried reverse and it went freely. So I backed about a 1/2 mile to a Bennits BBQ parking lot to check it out. I found my car mag-lite (a must) and saw what happened...
Apparently the top bolt that goes from the steering nuckle to the caliper bracket sheared off, it was gone and only old threads remained! The caliper was resting against the wheel and the bottom bolt was about to go. The wheel was scratched from the caliper dragging and catching the car but nothing too serious. None of the other parts were damaged other then scratches. The caliper would have definitely came loose and ripped the hose in half if I had the factory rubber lines. The Aeroquip/Mocal stainless braided line held up great and didn't show any sign of damage. The steering nuckle wasn't as fortunate. It bent at the mounting tab of the bottom caliper bracket bolt pretty badly. I straightened it best as possible on the road and limped it the 10 miles or so home.
I found a used nuckle for $70 locally and picked it up. The old nuckle is already off and the car is in it's favorite spot, the garage, and on stands. I am going to finish up putting it all back together tomorrow but I am nervous that this will happen again. I assembled all of it using factory hardware and torque specs exactly 3,000 miles a go. It has had no signs of any problems until this. Do you think the increased surface area and braking of the FSVT fronts increased the load on the bolt (Metric 10.9 btw) finding it's weak link? I am going to try a little longer of a bolt since there is room. The factory bolt with the spacer had plenty of thread in the bracket but maybe the length it lost from the spacer (1-2 threads max) was just enough to cause a problem with more load on the bolt. I will post pictures of all of this tomorrow.
To the few others with the FSVT fronts. Did you use longer bolts? If not...How many miles on the front brakes with factory bolts? Maybe I drive my car more and have just been the first one to find a problem with the swap. I am also thinking that the whole idea of spacing the bracket away from the nice solid strong nuckle with a 1/2 washer isn't the best idea. Do the Baer/Wilwood/TCE kits have custom brackets that fit the nuckle or do they use some kind of a "spacer" too? TIA - Sorry for the long read!
