Stainless Steel Caliper Pistons

[crazy steve]

but this issue shows up worse in lighter shades rather than the black or dark shades normal to parts like brake calipers. One could always powder coat after to achieve both good looks and a durable part. This condition manifests itself in welded parts also.

Cast parts tend to have pits and rough exterior. These imperfections are rarely very deep. If this were not so, brake calipers would be one of the last applications for cast metal.

Powdercoating has become my finish of choice wherever possible, but particularly on aluminum parts if I don't polish them. Once you get the needed equipment, it's cheaper than than painting as well as more durable. But even here, cast parts can present problems. If you're trying to coat used bits that have been exposed to lubricants or fluids, you need to 'bake' them to 'sweat' any oil/grease/etc that may have soaked in out of the parts. Learned this one the hard way....

As to anodizing, the guy that sells the kits I was looking at told me it could be a real crapshoot on cast parts. Unless you were going for a pitch-black finish, any defects in the casting would show up in the finished part in some degree. Die-cast would come out better generally compared to sand-cast, but he said that was no guarantee. When I polished my calipers (which look to be die-cast), they didn't seem to have any casting issues but nearly every other part I did had at least one flaw in it that wouldn't polish out, leading me to think that Yamaha used different 'grades' of aluminum for the various parts. The top tree and the hand controls in particular showed the most defects. I had one part (one of the switch housings) where the defect went quite deep, to the point I quit before I put a hole in it.

He mentioned the thing about welded parts too. He said the trick there was to use a fill metal identical/very close to whatever you're welding on so that the filler would 'take' the dye the same. But even here, you could get enough contamination from the welding process that color variations could show up.

It really bummed me out, as the color choices in anodizing are nearly unlimited if not always practical.

'78E original owner

[crazy steve]

They're here...

My set of SS caliper pistons came in the mail, and I must say I'm very happy with them. The finish is great; my one concern was whether the bore finish would be as smooth as the OEM part. On other SS pistons I've seen (for other applications), this has been an issue and sometimes a cause for leaks. These are as smooth if not smoother than the stockers as far as I can tell. They mic out to virtually identical with OEM in all important dimensions. The SS used is completely non-magnetic if that makes any difference.

The only 'major' difference I can see is the chamfer at the bottom isn't quite as large which may make installing them a bit harder, but I don't see that as a big thing.

At $84 for a set of three including shipping from Germany, these look like a pretty good deal to me (PartsNMore wants $87 without shipping). Seeing how he wanted $24 each on Ebay, his discount to $22 each for 3 suggests that a 'group buy' may bring even bigger savings. But I've already got mine, so you're on your own for that. LOL!!

'78E original owner