Review: K sport 8 piston 355mm big brake kit (front only)
Baaack in 2006? 2007? I purchased these as a nice little upgrade to help her pull up after some serious downhill hairpins at a lovely lil bit of road I use to live near.
I purchased them from a store in Mona vale, NSW called Tweakit (tweakit.net) from memory the kit cost around $2800 to buy and came with everything needed to install
The reason I went with this kit is at the time there really were no other cheap options, the only USA manufac that had anything out there was 3sx, and they were the same price once you landed them, there were none of the stoptech or cheap brembo kits that you see around now. I priced up many brands and all of them were quoted at around $5-6K!! so the Ksport kit was an easy choice, couple this with it being essentially a copy of the AP Racing giving you access to the AP racing parts should you need to replace something.
http://www.aandbmotorsports.com/imag...20002%208p.jpg
so I popped on over to a good mechanic who promptly went to work installing them!
with the install the problem with our Hubs being larger than the Australian delivered models (odd but ok) meant the rotor hats had to be sent off and machined wider, and since they were that stupid orange colour I insisted on having them painted black (not that it lasted)
anyway suddenly braking was magnificent, stop after stop...no matter how much I beat the crap out of it it always stopped :D one small annoyance is the slotting of the rotors gives you a odd grinding through the steering wheel and a loud noise when your really hammering it (say 180 down to 80kmh) so I think next time round i'd go with rotors that have only two slots over the entire surface.
So around 6 months to a year of much fun later I've started to notice heat spots and cracking on the rotors, I took the car into A & B Motorsport (http://www.aandbmotorsports.com/brake.html) who are the Australian Distributor of Ksport for a look, they explained that I had one of the first set of K sport 8 pot brakes and that the disks actually had less material in them (more space between the surfaces for venting...which is bad it seems) than the current ones, however since I'd taken so long to come back to them I would need to purchase a replacement set of rotors...for an astounding $900 :O
yeah SO I said no that's fine what else can we do until I can find another rotor solution, being honest the guy there was pretty good about it, he mentioned that if I decided to go with replacement rotors, that he would have a word to the factory about getting a decent discount seeing my issue, he also said that the stock pads the kit comes with are rubbish and gave me a discounted set of EBC Redstuff pads to try out.
Since then the EBC Redstuff seem to be doing their thing and I'm not noticing as many cracks forming as before (had the rotors machined down slightly) but then I'm not beating it up like I was before.
Soo, at the moment I'm saving my pennies till I can afford some AP Racing rotors, apparently they sell replacement ones for the K sport hats and that will be my final breath with this kit before upgrading to a 380mm kit.
In conclusion, I'm pretty sure a new kit would be fine for just about anyone given the option though i'd recommend Supercar Engineering's Stoptech kit in either 355mm or 380mm rotor as long as your good to stick with 18" or 19" rims.
a bit of a Prologue, the AP Racing Rotors that I'm looking at are the J slot ones:
http://www.3000gt.com.au/car/Misc/Brakes/APjhook1.jpg
and IF that does not help then I'll be looking at a 380mm kit but with wider rotors...so 34 or 36mm WIDE ...for effing unreal heat absorbing capabilities :) maybe by that time carbon brakes will be somewhat affordable :D
