I fitted the rear brakes on Saturday, but it was a bit more involved. It shouldn't have been, but I made a few mistakes early on. First, make sure your vendor (Gordon Levy in my case) knows exactly which rear end you have and, more importantly, which axle shafts. I had replaced mine with some from Summit when I found my junkyard axles were bent.

It's a bit of a story, but posted to save someone else the pain. I had bought SUM-700128 which are 30.63" long. They are theoretically the correct ones for my 2002 GT, but you can buy shorter ones (since Wilwood removes the backing plate). If you're using Wilwood (and only then), then you can buy SUMN-700126 which are 29.94" long. 0.69" shorter.

Wilwood's kit relies on a 2.5" offset, but I had a ~3.2". But here we are on Saturday morning at my friend's machine shop, so we push on. I always think we can find/build a solution.. and we did - but it took a 10-hour day without breaks.

Picture so you can follow along.

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The first step is to remove all the old stuff, easy.

Then, measure the slop in your axles using a dial indicator. We had 0.020 on one side and 0.013" on the other. We want to make this zero or close to it. Otherwise any axle sideways movement in corners can push the pad away from the rotor. And you'll have extra pedal travel to take that up before you get braking.

Then drain the rear, pull the c-clips, and slide out the axles (don't rest on, or damage the seals).

To take up the slop, use shims behind the c-clips. Sounds easy, but.. I'd forgotten to look for shims in the box and there weren't any. Check for this stuff! Ask your vendor if anything is missing! Anyway, it's the day of installation, and no local shops have any. Luckily my friend has shim stock. a box of thin metal sheets that you can cut any shim from!

We used the C-clip as a template, cut them slightly larger, sandwiched the shims between the C-clips, and made the perfect size on the belt sander. It worked great! We made two 0.013" shims, installed them, and measured again.

This time, we measured 0.006 and 0.004 slop (yeah, the math doesn't add up, I know), and we left it there. This is barely detectable movement.

DO NOT FORGET to put the drum brakes (the parking brake) on before the axle goes in. We installed the axles, glued the cover back on and everything before realizing this, so it all came off again.

Installed the drum brakes, and mocked everything up. This is where we found that the rotor was 0.69" away from centered in the caliper.

So we removed the spacer (#12 in picture) which is 0.48" so that got us closer. But we were still 0.21" off, so we got on the lathe and made 8 x 0.21" spacers from stainless steel stock and placed them behind the drum assembly. That got us to a perfect spot again. (The original bolts still worked, I have 0.25" longer bolts coming today to give us some extra thread)

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The rest of the installation went great - super easy to bolt bits on, and if I had the correct axles in there (and checked for shims beforehand) none of this would have been necessary. But hey, it was kinda fun.

I may still buy the shorter axles; it's the "right thing to do," and then I can use the kit as-is. But that will pull the wheels in 0.69", and it'll be close to the bodywork and narrow my track. So I'm still deciding.

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One last comment about Gordon Levy—he's been very responsive and took calls on Saturday when I had questions. Although he couldn't help directly, I'm still very glad that I got the brakes from him and had direct-line support. He knows what he's doing!