Not a significant factor at all unless you happened to remove the cooling fins that the calipers don't have....

 

That is another valid point. Maybe the close proximity of the wheel will do some cool heat transfer stuff. Probably wont be as big of deal as the structural integraty of the caliper

 

I can assure you that they don't spend the money to forge a brake caliper. it's either cast steel or cast iron. I'm on the road right now, but my money is on cast iron. Cast anything is weaker than billet or forged.

I don't see tensile (pulling) or compression (squeezing) near as much of a problem as bursting from grinding the wall too thin in the area of the piston bore ............. which is bending.

 

I mostly agree with this statement. I don't really see how a torsional load applies though. While there are tension and compression loads involved in bending, the bending force is magnified in both tension and compression.

The compression in the area that you are talking about ........... is, well missing, been ground away.

 

J - I appreciate your tenacity, but in all honesty I must say that you don't seem to be very well versed in engineering principles, industry practices or materials science.

 

LOL, your too funny

BTW, how many steel extrusions have you seen lately .............. just looking back at a couple recent posts

 

The torsional it applies but is not as much of a factor, but still a factor when considering removing material. The pistons will cause the bending, The rotating of the rotor, and the caliper counteracting it will cause the torsion. So you will get a stress concentration at a paticular point where the stresses meet.

The compression area is indeed being ground away, but there is also a layer underneath that.

I would say, get a caliper from the junkyard, grind it down to your specs and hook up a porta power with a gauge and find out at what pressure it blows up at. What is better than engineering something.....finding a model and testing it till it fails!!!

 

I am willing to bet that on most, prolly all american made DOT vehicles, the brake calipers are made of cast iron. I worked in a foundry in South GA, and we made a lot of brake calipers for different vehicles. We produced the Differential for the Hummer also. All we did was cast iron with x amount of alloys depending on the request from the company. I was in metrology lab(tolerancing lab), but I went to the metalurgy lab often to kill time, and they were always adding this and that to try and keep the iron mixture the same content..

 

It'd be easy enough to drag a file across it, that'd tell the tale. I may do that when I get home, but my money is still on cast iron. Probably nothing but class 40 gray iron ......... run of the mill stuff. It'll have a high yield point, but a very elogation. I closed my machine shop almost 2 years ago, LOL, I could dust off some of my old books when I get home, hehe.

 

Well, I have to admit, I never even took the rotational force of the rotor into consideration.

Yeehaw, backyard engineering ......... that's what makes MythBusters such a good show.

 

Hydraulic line pressure has nothing (zero) to do with piston pressures. Line pressure is measured in PSI and a piston has several square inches. Take the 800psi accepted line pressure and a 6" piston ............ that takes you WAY off the charts @ 22,619#.

Tensile stregths are only good for comparative numbers in a test lab. If you grind the the stongest steel made thin enough ........... it'll break. Steel with 80,000# tensile strength may hold 800,000# or 8# depending on the application.


I think we have all agreed that a hand grinder may not make a perfect match with an OEM caliper for real world dependability and safety.

But, I'd still like to have an example of a steel extrusion.

I know that I'm lacking in knowledge and abilities when it comes to manufacturing.............



so I'm looking to expand my knowledge.

 

Well if they fit on your 05 and not your 06, then why not try to fit on a pair of 05 calipers on your 06 truck, and save the questionable grinding??? and one last