The Spark

I'm thinking about getting my brake calipers powder coated Anniversary Red but I will be taking it to 1 or 2 track days.

Does anyone have any experience with powdercoated calipers on the track. I saw where the heat may be too much for them.

Thanks.

Gary2KC5

Get some air vented to the rotor/caliper and it will reduce the chance.

My factory red calipers survived fine from 5 events this year, 2 at hard braking tracks. I've seen other red calipers that ended up burnt brown though. venting air from the front spoiler to the caliper/rotor is key to reducing heat.

pic below is from former C5

undertaker

now thats braking....

davidfarmer

the color will fade over time. You'd save money just painting them every season, or going with black!

VetteDrmr

I went with black, for a couple of reasons. #1, the calipers get dirty from the brake dust, and #2, black just loses it's gloss when it gets hot, as opposed to changing colors.

Make sure that the contact surfaces on the calipers are left clean or cleaned off after powdercoating; you don't want soft surfaces like that handling the loads that brake application will put on them.

HTH, and have a good one,
Mike

WNeal

I can tell you that tracking mine for 5 events in 06 pretty much wasted the color on my calipers. They are painted red, not powdercoated.

Regardless of how the powdercoat holds up, they will get very dirty and it is as if it is baked on. (at least with mine)
I just cleaned and painted them again.


After painting them again (after the events) They looked just like this prior to the events.


After 2 Events Beginning to darken down. After 4 you could almost not tell they were red.


Before I did anything



EDIT
Found this one, after 4 events

z060ntrack

Holy crap! That one pic looks just like the stock Caliper with whatever paint you used looks like it totally burned off. I would think powder coating would hold up at least somewhat better than that.

Jeffvette

Powder coating does hold up better.

I'll take a shot of my calipers tomorrow in the daylight. They have faded a couple of shades, but they are still a bright red. Nothing as bad as WNeal posted.

Solofast

Using paint or powder coat on calipers is actually insulating them and reduces the heat transfer, and increases caliper temps. There are better things to coat them with that actually reduce the caliper temperatures. Look into the Swaintech BBE (black body emitter) coatings, that increase the emissivity of the caliper and allow it to radiate more heat as opposed to trapping it into the caliper with paint. Since we are talking about high performance a brake system that is marginal, it would be a lot better to get more heat out of the caliper than to paint it. Even a few degrees is might make the difference between boiling the fluid and having a "bad day"....

Think about it, if you are getting the calipers hot enough to toast the high temp paint on them, they are getting hotter than you want them..

This is the last place in the world I would think folks would be talking about "bling" things like how pretty their calipers are.