ok, well i don't have the money to upgrade all the rotors/calipers just yet, but i was thinking of getting some HAWK pads and the 5 line kit...what kind of gains will just the 5 line kit offer with stock everything else? anyone know??

 

The brake lines alone are supposed to reduce stopping distances on stock brake systems by around 18ft. That's somebody's kid, another car, a deer, you get my point. I'll definitely post up my results after the install is finished to give my opinion. You can follow along here.

https://ls1tech.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140610

 

thanks Jeff...i'm thinking about doing the lines while i have the truck tore apart for the heads/cam, how involved/hard are they to install? i've never done much brake work before.

 

Should be fairly simple. If you're doing a heads/cam project you can tackle the brake lines. Just remove your stock lines and install the new lines in their place and bleed the system, one caliper at a time. Also, remember to bleed them in order of furthest distance to the master cylinder. That would make the rear passenger side caliper the one you bleed first and so on. The last one you bleed will be the driver side front caliper.

 

hmmm, the heads/cam is easy....this stuff sounds more complicated....guess if it looks to complicated i can have my buddy at the local chevy house do it. he's a brake guy so he should be able to figure it out.

 

Brake lines do not make a car slow down any faster. What steel braided lines do is improve feel as they do not swell like normal rubber lines. You'll get a firmer pedal when braking at extremes, and more confidence in your stopping power, thus giving you a placebo effect of stoppng faster.

better tires and pads are the only sure fire ways to stop faster. Well that and driving slower.


If you really want to dive into things, then the aftermarket caliper market is another way to get more precision stopping out of your system by moving to a fixed caliper rather then a floating caliper used on many vehicles(it's cheaper to manufacture) Then you can get a larger rotor to reduce brake fade and possibly increase pad contact area, and more and more... Getting to stop fast can get really expensive.

 

the main problem i see with bigger rotors is that i am going to run 15" wheels with ET drags, so i have to have something that will fit inside a 15" wheel, aswell as work well with my 17" wheel/tire combo...the upgraded calipers are in the FAR future though

 

Well in that case, a good 4 pot caliper, good pads, and good tires are an excellent start! what a 4 pot caliper can do is allow for even pressure on the pads so that you get full pad contact on the rotor surface. Also, many aftermarket calipers are fixed and not floating so that way your feel will be improved as well with less caliper deflection.

 

I agree with what you said above. The brakes lines were being advertised as decreasing stopping distances. That's what I was going off of.

I thought about going to an aftermarket big brake kit but I still run my stock wheels occasionally. It was also a price thing. I figured I could do the entire system for about the same as what I could do just the front for.