Akebono caliper upgrade:
-This adventure was the fun of over 3 months of work, sweat, blood, and tears. From acquiring a set of akebono calipers from a friend who no longer needed them and then slowly picking up other pieces. Thought we were ready to go and the first day we get through cutting the dust shields, prepping the calipers and find out 2 of the banjo bolts were wrong. This set us back but we had the 2 rear calipers on and had the new bolts on order, come to finish the front calipers and had to add a washer to one of the rear calipers.
First big issues popped up, we stripped one of the calipers putt it back on:
So now the debate of what to do, we put the other rear caliper back to OEM so there was no bias and left the front as is. Got a new caliper source and sent to Mike the powdercoater, huge thanks to Mike as he helped get the second caliper done and back before I even realized he had received! So we were all squared away and ready to finish up, and then disaster struck again....The master cylinder failed and we were getting zero brake pressure. This time I sent the car to a shop I trusted and had them put a new one in and got some pedal back but still not 100%. So instead of chasing our tails we put the system back to 100% OEM and go pedal for a couple stops and then it stopped.
Now I am unsure of what to do, some time goes by while research is done and some Nissan engineers were called to help. Got a possible solution, so was prepping to get the car to go back and repaired. We decided to put all the akebono calipers on and this time the front left caliper stripped!! I still took the car to Nissan, 3/4 akebono on the car and had it tested. The engineer was right and the ABS actuator failed (though no CEL oddly), got a new caliper in with the ABS and it was all buttoned up and 100% fixed, finally!
In the end, we got the brakes sorted and the misses was finally happy to be able to drive her car, safely. Couple days after having it back we had brunch with some other Z friends and got some new photos of her car and she got some good seat time playing with her brakes.
