Is there any other brake swap?

[RhodeStiva]

yea i might keep stock for a while and wait.

[russian]

i am selling brackets and hubs to use rear escort calipers and rotors. for the front you probably want 2003-2005 kio rio - there is a thread on the first page of 'custom brakes' section

[Bert]

Near as I can tell the Aspire swap is by far the easiest and most complete. You know you have all the necessary parts when the donor car suspension and brakes are intact and right in front of you. Aspires do exist and you will find one if you're patient and persistent. I advertised for an Aspire via a "wanted" ad in Kijiji a few years ago and was contacted by a nearby fellow that had 2 or 3 parts cars somewhere in the woods behind a farm. He was doing much the same as us Festy nuts by keeping spares to augment his one roadworthy car. His only problem was he thought the parts were really valuable. So I bought an entire lo-mile running car, from 100 miles away, that had all new bearings, brakes and tires for a lesser price.

Kia Rio fronts are supposed to be direct fit but you still have to find or track down an intact rear trailing arm to compliment since the bolt pattern is 100mm instead of 4 1/2 inch.

[Damkid]

I don't think we should go as far as sticking this..as they're a ton of threads on brakes already.

Exactly

[Advancedynamix]

Problem with the Capri brakes is there's no rear brakes to go with it.
So you end up with a really unbalanced system

I ran Capri brakes with Festiva stock drums for quite a while and the system was very well balanced. I now have Aspire fronts but I still run the festiva rears and it'll slide the rear in trail braking with PFC racing pads in the front heated to track temp. In fact. when I get off the track, I can hold my hand on my drums, but can't even touch my front rims. The rear brakes don't do much work on these cars, unless your planning on towing a trailer or some other strange activities (high speed reverse driving maybe? :p).

The Aspire front calipers are a better design than the Capri calipers and less likely to stick. You may be able to mix match and use the Escort calipers as they are very similar to the Aspire ones and take the same pads. Also, Aspire pads work on Capri calipers, but Capri pads won't work on aspire calipers. There are much better pad choices for an Aspire, so this shouldn't ever be a problem either way. 14" wheels can be expensive to fit with tires that are happy on the Festiva, so take that into consideration when planning this out. Aspire swap is a better choice, and there may be someone on here that can find you a swap and mail it or bring it to madness. I also recall that (as previously mentioned) the Rio swap is basically the same as the aspire swap and you shouldn't have trouble finding a Rio in the yard. Hope that helps.

[FestYboy]

Problem with the Capri brakes is there's no rear brakes to go with it.
So you end up with a really unbalanced system

not so... i have the swap and the rear does just what it's supposed to. you just need to have heavier springs in the front to counter the front dive and keep the rear on the ground. a capri swap on stock springs will cause the car to endo with good tires installed.

[Advancedynamix]

^ that actually sounds kinda fun. Like that smart car that does the endos.

[PhoenixSHO]

03-05 rio knuckles (02 rio are only aspire knuckles)
matching rio tie rods
rio calipers
rio rotors

And you end up with a 10" vented rotor instead of a 8.5 solid. You end up with studs instead of bolts for wheels. But you also end up with the aspire bolt pattern.


I went in the RIO forum to ask them what kind of upgrade they had for the 03 rio , and their upgrade is a full on 1200$ brembo or something like that. So the rio 10" rotors with good pads should be more then enough.

[Damkid]

^ that actually sounds kinda fun. Like that smart car that does the endos.

It happened to me once back when I first got my Festiva on the road, as soon as the back end came off the ground, it also went sideways on me so when the back hit the ground again it just started fish-tailing on me which I luckily got back under control lol

Funniest part is that I drove up the guys house who I bought my festiva from and was giving him a test drive when that happened lol

[Advancedynamix]

This probably explains why my stock brakes on my 93 auto festiva actually feel like they have more initial bite than my aspire swap on tweak. The stock shocks act to exaggerate the feeling of inertia under braking. I know tweak stops in less distance, but it doesn't feel that way.

[Advancedynamix]

If anyone is interested in seeing how well Aspire brakes work with stock festiva drums, here is a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mUZ5...=ULwNqMDbDP_pQ

The Comparison vehicles in the video are C6 corvette (red) with professional driver and Porsche 997 twin turbo (silver) with an excellent driver. If you watch closely you will see that both sports cars easily out pull the Festiva, but the Festiva out brakes the Porsche and the Corvette by several car lengths and closes up the gap with higher corner entry speeds and shorter braking zones. In short, this brake combo works better than a 150,000 dollar Porsche's big brembo brakes. The Festiva has Performance friction pads on eBay cross-drilled rotors. The entire brake package was less than half the price of the pads on the Porsche. This Festiva has stock rear drums with cheap autozone shoes. It also has a 89-95 Miata master cylinder and booster. Tires were Toyo Proxes R888 (the porsche also had R888's on it, and the Corvette has Continental tires).