Based on a member's suggestion, this is basically a dupe of a post that I made over in the Super Duty trucks forum. I'm a new member looking for some expertise. I know this has been discussed to death, but...

I've got a Dana 70 full-floating rear axle that I'm interested in converting to disc brakes. The common thing is to use front calipers on custom brackets. The hitch -- if you want to call it that -- is that I want a "real" parking brake and not something like a line lock, so that pretty much eliminates the front caliper idea. That simple demand seems to have severely limited my available options (short of just coughing up boatloads of cash for an aftermarket solution).

In looking through every truck and offroad forum I could find -- including this one -- there don't seem to be a huge number of options. At least that people have worked out on their own. I may have hit on a "new" solution and was hoping to impose on y'all's expertise...

A lot of MFG's over the years have used D70's in all kinds of vehicles, but Ford seems to be the only one who put rear discs on them for any extended period of time. My research turned up some factory spec sheets from 2001 and 2002 listing that the E350/450 Super Duty's (and possibly the F-series trucks) came with 4-wheel discs and rear mounted parking brakes (some models of the same vehicles used tranny-mounted parking brakes instead). AH-HAH! I thought. Maybe this is the solution that I'm looking for (unless I've missed something really obvious).

The standard alternatives for this sort of project seem to be:
1) Skipping the parking brake altogether
2) Using late-'70's Cadillac El Dorado calipers (which have an integral, though totally unreliable parking brake mechanism)
3) Using Explorer calipers since they have an integral parking brake mechanism. (Requires that you get blank rotors and drill them for the required bolt pattern.)

One's out of the question, two seems less than ideal, and I worry that the Explorer setup in general isn't heavy duty enough to stop a loaded truck (despite the fact that it has the p-brake feature). Which brought me to the possibility of using a Super Duty setup. I don't know enough about the features over the years to know how many years and which parts will interchange. My assumptions are that this is the drum-style brake that mounts behind the disc assembly, and that it will mate up with a standard cable actuator.

After reaching this epiphany, I'm also assuming that there must be some really obvious -- to everyone but me -- reason why no one's done (or at least discussed) this. Every time the subject seems to have come up on this forum, people are recommending the really expensive aftermarket disc conversion kits (Blackbird, Currie, etc.) over what would otherwise be an infinitely cheaper stock solution.

Anybody got any thoughts on that?

michael


P.S. If it matters to the discussion, it's a D70 dually axle.

 

If you get rotors you will have to decide if you want to turn the id of the rotor out, or turn down the hub. & if your truck has a metric bolt patern you will have to drill a new set of holes in the rotor. I'd turn the rotor, just incase it didn't work out and you would want to go back.
The parking brake in the Caddy callipers works fine as long as you keep them adjusted.
I'm not 100% sure but I think the S.D. with a 70 & disc were all drw. Maby someone can tell us for sure ?