I was stuffing a lot of tire in stock wheelwells up front with the 275's on 9.5" rims and now I'm going to try 285's on a 10", so backspacing is important. I could touch the swaybar with the tires at full lock and it rubbed the powdercoating off. I'm concerned about backspacing when ordering the new wheels so I haven't ordered them because I was afraid if the new brake combo moved the wheel flange out I'd be in big trouble. So I figured better to install the new brakes and spindles and measure before ordering. I will loose some more turning radius and plan on installing limiters on the lower control arms. The types of driving I do with this car don't require extremely sharp turns.
With the original spindle and rotor still in place I used a straight edge to put some tape markers on the car and floor so I could line up the new combo and see if there was a difference.
The first step involved in swapping out the spindle assemblies is removing the brake lines at the frame mounts where the flex tubes end. Since I replaced the flex lines with braided about a bit over a year ago I figured everything should come apart easy, right? WRONG! LOL The passenger side gave me a hassle so I did what anyone irritated would do, yup, I got a big pair of linesmans pliers and cut the hardline. AHAHAHA. I make new brake lines all the time so no big deal. Just would have been nice not to have to make that one from the line lock solenoid over to the passengers side since it was fairly new.
So after making quick work of the stubborn brake line I moved on to removing the spindles with everything attached. The Baers come all set up on a new spindle so all thats necessary to swap the setups is loosening, separating, and then unbolting the tie rod end and upper/lower ball joints. After putting the new assembly in place I checked my tape marks and was pleasantly surprised to find no change in the wheel flange position so I can easily calculate backspacing for the new Rushforth wheels based on the old wheels.
Because I'm concerned about weight I weighed the stock vs. Baer spindle assemblies fully loaded. I got out the bathroom scale and picked up one of each and weighed myself and a piece to be sure I was in the accurate range of a bath scale. I was shocked to find that the new ones were actually LIGHTER than the smaller stock rotor size ones! In disbelief I then piled both old ones on the scale then both new ones. Sure enough! The Baer assemblies with giant rotors are about 1-1 1/2 lbs LESS than stock for each assembly! While the rotating mass is heavier because of the much bigger rotor the overall unsprung weight is lower so in theory there would be some slight handling improvement and a beneficial loss of front end weight helping the front/rear weight bias.