Re: Aftermarket brake drums

Yeah, NAPA often has 2-3 grades of parts for every budget. Get the premium grade and you should be fine. That said, service-grade rotors (Like Raybestos Red Box or Raymold) worked fine for me.

i'm fine with some of the after-market disks and drums, just don't buy cheap chinese crap. they use crap iron, they don't know how to heat treat, and they don't know about stress risers.

example:

I suspect that the Chinese foundries _do_ know their business. Their business just happens to be meeting a market demand for cheaper, crappy products. I'll bet my bottom dollar that castings can be made less expensive by eliminating the fillets that prevent stress cracking. Less-complex pattern making, perhaps?

absolutely not. the cost delta between the two mold patterns is zero. zip. nada. absolutely nothing. and that doesn't account for crappy steel that cracks outside of the stress riser zone! [i should post pics of that for you too.]

seriously, if you see castings like that, any material, any application, don't walk, /run/ away. the perpetrators need their orifices used for teeming ladles.