Alex's R32 GTST brake upgrade and braided hoses

My R32 GTSt came with quite good 280mm 4pot front brakes. As I was looking for a bit more "bite" on the track and the dics were getting a bit old. I thought I'd upgrade to some R33 GTSt front dics and calipers (which are the same as R32 GTR's).

R33 GTSt discs are 296mm and the 4 pot calipers bolt directly on the R32 hubs and fit under the stock 16 wheels. The only slight stumbling block is that the standard brake lines have a hard pipe section running from a bracket on the hub to the caliper itself. This requires bending slightly to allow the male flare nut to screw into the R33 caliper since due to the larger discs the hole in the caliper is ~9mm further away from centre of the hub. I managed to do this without leaks or kinks but the hard pipe was too hard and short to rework the bend in the pipe in a way that I 100% happy with. As part of the upgrade I also wanted fit braided hoses, however I had trouble sourcing hoses - goodridge and others only list the GTR hoses. Unsure if they'd work I got hold of some second hand GTR braided hoses and confirmed they dont fit a GTSt. So I opted to get some hoses made up to my own design. This meant I could run them all the way to the caliper and thus replaced the hard pipe section altogether. I decided pretty quickly to have stainless steel swagged fittings rather than alloy "self-assembled" aka "race" fittings. I picked the brain of Chris Wilson on the gtr.co.uk forum and made sure I was thinking along the right lines and he helpfully sent me a couple of pics of his "custom made" set up.

I looked up the parts I needed in the Goodridge catalogue. The fittings are all 10mmx1 and either female convex or male concave or universal (this site was handy to help the identification of what i needed http://www.paragonperformance.com/Fitting photos.html). I also chose to add 3 spring clip "locators" along the length of each hose as per the original hoses (though this added to the cost a bit but). After a bit of searching I found Merlin Motorsport based at Castle Combe Race Circuit who were helpful and friendly and could supply the fittings and assemble/pressure test the hoses at no extra cost (with a very quick turn around).  I measured up the original hoses on the car using a bit of garden wire which was bendy enough to mold to the shape of the hose and then straighten out and measure. I knocked up a semi-technical drawing in MSPAINT and emailed Merlin the design, luckily they got the gist of what I wanted and we did the deal. The hoses look lovely fitted nicely :) at some stage I'll get Merlin to make up replacement rear hoses which will be much cheaper as they just require a female fitting at either end.

As an aside, here's a tip that is picked up along the way, alot of people will tell you (correctly) that you should use a good flarenut spanner when your taking apart and re-assembling brake unions. unfourtunately I had a real problem sourcing a good flarenut wrench, the jaws just bent open on the Sealey ones I bought! However I found that my biggest adjustable wrench (which is decent quality, made by laser) actually gripped the flarenuts more securely and being quite long gave good leverage to crack the flarenuts which probably hadn't been shifted in 12years. I managed not to round any of the flarenuts and in the past I have found that a real problem. Though I also used Plus Gas this time, which I didn't used to bother with.