Ok, so surprise surprise, the brakes on my truck are shot... before we get too out of hand here, I'd like to pick your collective brains. I want to go stock brakes. They worked for years, good enough for me. So! That being said, i hate having to mess around with wheel bearings every time i have to do brake rotors. A little trick i found on a third gen f body forum is people machining off the rotor from the hub portion, and using hat style rotors. Have any of you done that? It seems like it would work, machining the rotor off the hub and just run 4wd rotors for ease of maintenance?

 

All that just so you don't have to repack, or replace wheel bearings?

Do F150 brake rotors not come preinstalled with bearing races?

 

I'm with mrollings53. Sounds like a lot of work for limited pay off. I have a 79 Camaro w/ the old style rotors. When it's time to turn the rotors or replace them, it's time to repack the bearings too. If you turn the rotors down and use the center section as a hub the bearings will still need to be repacked once in a while to get the most life out of them.

 

If you get quality brake pads, with fresh rotors, you won't have to do brakes for long enough that you'll forget you ever contemplated something else

 

If cutting off the rotor is a lot of work some people sure are lazy.

If you want to convert to standalone rotors I see no reason you can't do it. Easiest way to turn off the rotor portion is obviously a lathe. The second easiest in my experience is to put the whole assembled knuckle in a bench vise, crank the bearing preload tight enough that an angle grinder will cause it to spin slowly and just have at it until you grind through the side of the rotor hat. I recall it takes about 20min per rotor but I've only done this to 8-lug rotors using the little Harbor Freight grinder that you have to baby if you don't want to let the smoke out.

All the rotors I've cut down have had far thicker mounting surfaces than their 4wd counterparts. If this is the case with your rotors you will need to reduce the thickness of the wheel mounting surface in order to get 4wd rotors from another F150 to fit properly. Unless you want a ton of runout, warped rotors and lug nuts that won't stay tight you would actually have to use a real machine for that job. Any lathe, brake lathe, or clapped out old mill with a rotary table would do the job well enough. However you can probably find a rotor from a Jeep or Dodge that has a deep enough hat to mount between the hub and wheel allowing you to bypass the problem entirely.

 

Are you changing your brakes often? Seems like a neat idea, but I am with the other fella's that say it is a better idea to repack your bearings or replace when rotors are due for a turn or replacement. If you have a 100,000 mile truck, how many more brake changes are you going to make. Seems like a doing for the sake of doing kinda thing, in that case, knock yourself out! Its your truck. You did mention you wanted stock brakes tho....and that is not stock.

 

 

How often are you replacing rotors?
At 270k I'm on my second set, with lots of life left. Then again I mostly run highway or gravel, no stop and go..

 

I've swapped rotors with no fuss. Knock the bearings out the back, make sure they have enough grease, drop them in the new rotor and re-use the old seal. Bam...done in minutes. No leaks or issues. Granted, if there were issues with a bearing I would replace it or seal. Most times there is not and as long as they are clean and lubed I've never had an issue.

Unless you can get the machine work done for free(or really cheap), it is not worth it in my eyes. I work at a machine shop and can do any work I need.........and still never worried about it enough to do that work.

 

Standalone rotors are far cheaper than the ones integrated into the hub. Rockauto has the standalone ones for $19 + $9 shipping and the 2wd ones for $32 + $11 shipping. Pads are $10-$20

So assuming you're buying the cheapest rotors on Rock Auto and already have an angle grinder you save $30ish by grinding the rotor off the hub (assuming that the rotor from whatever application actually fits costs about the same as the F150 4wd rotor).

I'd totally grind down some rotors in order to turn a $80 brake job into a $50 brake job but I'm not some rich old man who's lighting his cigars with $20s and too arthritic to turn a wrench.

There's no reason to buy new rotors to cut down when you can use the ones on the truck or get a pair from a junkyard. There's no reason to pay to have the rotor machines off the hub. An angle grinder can be bought for $10 and a grinding wheel is $2.

 

I dunno if I would be doing this just to save 20 bucks. There are a couple of questions that need answering.

I know the 4WD rotors are pressed together with the hubs by the wheel studs. You have to knock them out to separate the hub and rotor. I don't know if the 4WD rotors would center properly on the 2WD hubs or how the brakes would behave if the rotors are not locked securely by the wheel studs. Devil's advocate thinking, of course, but the potential is here to unintentionally create an unsafe situation.

And that is not worth saving $20.

 

Oh god, what did i start... Lol! I love all the ideas and criticism. Doing any machine work is not a problem at all for me. I've been a professional wrench breaker for almost 12 years, and also have access to a full machine/fabricating shop. Tbo, most trucks i work on are 5 times this size. The truck is a work horse beater and sits alot. As it is, the brakes are already shot, and instead of tossing them in the ol scrap pile, why not cut the rotor part off, and buy cheaper rotors? And yes, this would be considered using stock brakes (if the truck had 4wd). Ding! Light bulb! If i need a spacer, i can do that. Ill just burn one out of the laser table.

 

You won't need a spacer. If anything you'll need to take material off the back of the hub in order to get the mounting face for the rotor to be in the same place it would be on a 4wd. If you do need to take material off the rear face of the hub you should only do so up to the ID of the 4wd rotor so that the rotor can be hub centric like on a 4wd hub. It's not strictly necessary but it doesn't hurt and removing more material is more work and takes longer so why not. Since you have access to a machine shop I assume you're competent enough to sort the minor details out yourself.

What you're worried about is a non issue here. Rotor on the back side is functionally equivalent to the 4wd setup. Rotor between the hub and wheel is functionally equivalent to every modern car.

Make sure you post pictures and tell the haters to suck it when you're done.

 

Crown Vic swap will get you unit hubs...

 

So, looking at a 2WD rotor, they are cast hub and rotor as 1 piece. I'm not following what you are thinking here in terms of what you plan to machine off where and why.

The first step would be to machine off the old rotor. This would leave you with the hub and the wheel mounting surface. I expect you would make this cut along the step between the wheel mounting surface and the rotor. Depth would not be critical, but OD would have to be compatible with the ID of the 4WD rotor hat. Possibly another machining operation?

Next, you likely would have to take the thickness of the 4WD rotor center material off the wheel face of the 2WD hub so that the rotor ends up in the proper location. I don't see how removing material from the rear of the 2WD hub would change anything here. This would allow you to leave a step in the face of the 2WD hub that could make a concentric fit for the center hole of the 4WD rotor. You would have to remove the wheel studs to do this. There likely is enough material around here to do the machining without any significant compromise of strength, but you won't get that guarantee from me.

Bottom line is this may be doable, but I don't see any practical or economical reason to do so.