reversing the front brake calipers

It seems a lot of people on this site have moved their front brake calipers from the front of the fork to the back. Is there any advantage to this and if so, is it as simple as just putting the left fork on the right side and the right fork on the left side?
The problem I forsee is with that little pipe connecting the cable to the caliper, but it looks like people have just bypassed it and let the cables float. Any tips would be appreciated.
thanks
dave

Post edited by: davidp23, at: 2005/11/04 16:51

Dave, the main advantages for brake calipers at the rear of the forks.
1. Better balanced steering. Imagine the steering head could rotate 360 degrees.
2. Supposedly, better braking is achieved by the pads locking against something solid (like the fork leg!), hence, all modern bike have adopted this configuration.

You sometimes have to re-bend the tubes or use new braided lines direct to caliper. Worthy of mention (for Z1/Z900) is that you need to buy a new (longer) speedo cable. The Z1000 A2 fits.
Regardz.

Can someone post some pics or drawings of what it takes to do this?
I would like to do this on my KZ1000.

I think you have to reverse the tubes, left on right right on left, I did on mine at first, but I only had one disc at the time. You have dual discs up front right now correct? You should be able to bend your lines to work in their new positions. If the caliper mounting brackets are centered on the fork slider you may just be able to remove the front wheel and rotate the slider, then remount your caliper so its facing the right way.

Hope that didnt make things worse.

Allshookup wrote:

Can someone post some pics or drawings of what it takes to do this?
I would like to do this on my KZ1000.

From your avatar and from general knowledge of the KZ1000P, I think the calipers on your bike are already behind the fork legs.

Something I forgot to mention, when you reverse these calipers, you will find the bleed screws are no longer vertical. Which makes it hard to bleed these things, not that they were easy before!
RegardZ

Johnno wrote:

Allshookup wrote:

Can someone post some pics or drawings of what it takes to do this?
I would like to do this on my KZ1000.

From your avatar and from general knowledge of the KZ1000P, I think the calipers on your bike are already behind the fork legs.

Correct. They are on the back of tubes.
Harry

from my experiance its more of a cosmetic thing(they look a lot better on the backside)the forks are left and right you cannot just spin them onthe forkleg because the fender mounts are inside the legs.they are marked with arrows on the bottem so are not supposed to turn them around from side to side either,in the old days we would cut the bosses off and heli-arc them onthe oppisite side ,but now they are pretty common so the easiest thing to do is find a set lower legs from a 78 to 80 kz or ltd and use them .hope this helps