GET THIS WRONG AND YOU WASTED $4000 - WHAT THE HECK IS DISK TYPE
INTRO: 0:00
WHAT IS DISK TYPE: 1:18
HIGH VS LOW DISK: 2:05
HOW TO KNOW IF "X" WILL FIT: 4:24
DISK TYPES BY BRAND: 6:58
CALIPER TO BARREL CLEARANCE: 8:14
WRAP UP: 10:11
Please consider buying some wheels so we can get AC in our studio so I can stop looking like I just ran a marathon to tell you about wheels
www.threepiece.us
The whole point of custom 3-piece wheels is to get literally perfect fitment for your application. The last thing you want is to drop a few grand on some fresh built-to-order rims, wait months for them to arrive, then when they finally show up, you go to test fit one just to find that it hits the brake caliper.
How do you avoid making this mistake? In this article, we’re going to discuss the factors that affect brake clearance, the main one being disk type. We’ll use the universal rule of thumb that there should be at least 3mm of clearance between the wheel and caliper in the tightest area.
These concepts would also apply to monoblock wheels, the difference being that a wheel maker can switch out the lips and or disk type to give you basically any desired width/offset, whereas monoblock wheels are more ‘cookie cutter’.
What is ‘disk type’ anyway?
Let's start at the beginning. Disk type refers to the shape of the center disk (or 'face') of your multi-piece wheels. These are critical to brake clearance, in particular, brake caliper-to-spoke clearance (or ‘caliper-to-face’).
The other issue could come up when the top of the caliper contacts the barrel of the wheel. This happens when your wheels are too small, more on this later.
A ‘high disk’ will give you more brake clearance, while a ‘low disk’ has less. There are a few ways that wheel makers achieve this:
Add material to the back pad
Change the profile of the spokes
Or, a combination of both
Adding material to the back pad is effectively like adding a built-in spacer. Apart from making the lug pockets deeper, as we see in this picture from SSR, the spokes remain the same.
Another way to add extra brake clearance is to change the profile of the spokes. Sometimes this means more concavity, like we see with these Advan GT wheels. Wheels with a convex spoke (think SSR SP1) will have more curvature, i.e. more of a ‘C’ shape, to give increased clearance.