A rare and short notice opportunity came up on an IS-F Brake conversion for the wifey's IS350 and decided to just roll with it. Just to get a better idea of what I was getting myself into I called Joe Z to get his take on the conversion and what this entailed. After about a 30 minute conversation with valuable details swapping everything over I was ready to have a go at it the next day. The donor car I'm sure many of you are familiar with is the purple Import Tuner/Tein IS-F marketing car, which was to be crushed the next day after its donation to the wife's IS. The car originally had the Brembo GT IS-F kit on there...but I opted to stay with the stock IS-F fronts as I do not feel the need to have that much stopping power and paying for replacement parts at a much higher cost.

The entire brake swap was done at Evasive Motorsports in City of Industry as well as getting the alignment readings from their 4 post Hunter alignment machine. The setup did come with front and rear steel braided brake lines and we bled the system with Motul RBF600. Sorry I didn't have more time to take more detailed pictures and a step by step process. We started around 8pm and everything we took off the IS-F was also taken off the IS350 in exchange. The entire process probably took around 3.5 hours, I'm sure if we weren't exchanging parts on both cars it could have been much faster. If anyone has questions about the install or general information on this upgrade feel free to PM me and I will help you out as best as I can. Or you can just bring your car to Evasive and have them handle the entire swap for you from installation, brake fluid, brake flush, and alignment.

Important info:
*Everything was simply bolt on front and rear (minor mod to shield)

*IS-F front knuckle/hub assembly is required to be able to use the larger rotors.

*IS-F hub is approximately 8mm wider than a standard IS350 (which would be the same as having an 8mm spacer on your front wheels). This is where I ran into some issues that I will get into later.

*Rear disc brake cover may need to be modified by cutting and rolling to clear the larger diameter rotors. The other option would be to completely disassemble the rear brake and E-brake assembly externally and internally to get to the bolts to remove the shield (it looked too time consuming and a ***** at that).

*Stock IS250/350 18" wheels and spare tire will no longer work on the front.

And if anyone is wondering why I didn't do a 2-piece front was because I couldn't find anyone that made a factory replacement type in 2-piece. Only ones available that I know of are the ones that only come with after market BBK's for the IS-F. But it's possible someone does make them but I was just searching in the wrong places.

Sorry for some of the pictures being crappy, I only had an iphone during the time of the swap.





Front rotors were beat to hell..glazed, fractured and the pads were toast, looks like way beyond their max operating temps.


Brembo 2-piece rear 14.1 upgrade kit






Here's what the add'l 8mm looks like on the car. This is where the headaches began and costs began to add up. The car was basically sitting on top of the wheel at this point and i decided to raise the car, 7mm to be exact. But this did not help as it reduced the camber out of the suspension. At this point I grinded down the fender and bumper connection points including the bolt with washer down as much as I could. It helped, but I still couldn't turn the wheels more than a 1/2 turn and under braking even going straight the fenders were diving onto the front wheels even with the Tein SS set to max stiff. But I was able to manage driving the car home very carefully.


Alignment specs taken on the Evasive alignment machine before raising the car.


As many of us have been in search of some type of adjustable front camber kit for our cars, there are none available on the market as I've tried to source whatever I could from either the US or Japan, but NOTHING! One option was to go from a 245 to a 235 tire, but was only 2.3mm difference and it would actually have a very slight stretch to it. Other option was to stretch a 225 tire which would've been more than enough at about 15mm width difference on the 8.5 wide wheel. But the wife wasn't having it on a stretched tire. So last resort was to do it the right way.
So onto the next project, which was to tackle getting custom A-arms fabricated as proposed by Phillip at Tein who helped me with this brake project. The donor vehicle originally had them for track duties, but ended up on the 0-60 Magazine IS-F. So Phil pointed me in the right direction to get them custom made by Scott over at SPD Metal Works in Anaheim since they have a ton of experience with the 2nd Gen IS chassis as they are the ones that do all the fab work on the Falken IS Drift Car.
All back apart again at home! While I was waiting for the arms to finish I was also waiting on the StopTech premium replacement rotors to come off of back order.


Scott did a kick *** job and had a very very quick turn around time. He's a busy guy, but managed to get the arms done within 4 days for me. It was these arms that I spent most of the budget on, but well worth it. I was more than pleased with the final product. Please know that on spherical joints it may be a little bit harsher ride than you're used to since its solid and has no bushings. I am not sure about noise yet since I just put the car back together earlier in the evening and didn't test drive since it was pouring outside and no proper alignment yet.



StopTech rotors arrived along with a set of new Project Mu B-Force pads for the front and rear.




Here's the car back on all 4's tonight



Here's the tabs I had mentioned earlier that I had to grind down. Just by eyeballing the stance it appears that I probably have at least another full degree of camber. Originally SPD had the settings at 28mm inboard, but I felt that was a bit much and had them set them to about 14mm and right now it seems just about right. Now it appears I have more than enough clearance under suspension compression to not come in contact with anything around the wheel. Now I just need to take the car to Evasive and see exactly what the camber is at and possibly have them make some adjustments and give the car a proper alignment and away we go.


Thanks to Brad @ Evasive, Phil @ Tein, Will @ DC Sports, and TIA to Kel @ Evasive who's going to do the alignment on the car.

 

Excellent write-up! I was particularly interested in the custom A-arms that you used. This is something that many CL'ers would be interested in using (myself included). Please let us know your impressions of the arms. Do you think SPD Metal Works would mass produce this item?

 

Same questions as above and how much did they run? Car looks good!

 

I believe FIGS Engineering a board vendor is actually currently working on a set of front A-arms with adjustable camber actually. I saw an initial design layout of the of the pieces before being welded together and the design looks good.

 

That some great stuff you did. Those brakes look great. I'm sure if you went with a narrower tire in the front you could have avoided shaving the fender and cuting the tab OR just a fender roll up front but it's done already..lol. Why was the IS-F scheduled to be destroyed?

 

nice write up

 

As far as the A-arms go I do not believe they will be mass producing these as the spherical joints are pretty pricey and will be on custom orders only. You'll be looking to spend about $700 or so for his fabrication time + parts. The arms fit pretty well, it just takes a lil time to set the joints into the right position to set them in. The spacers for the joints were spot on from what I can tell as soon as they were positioned correctly.

 

I did have the option of going to a narrower tire as mentioned in the write up...but I did not want to step down 2 sizes from a 245 to a 225 with a 275 rear tire and deal with understeer at higher speeds, especially with at least 3 degrees of negative camber in the front. I found it to be a better choice to keep as much contact patch as possible. With the arms I'm able to avoid fender work and clear the bumper/fender tabs and washer, which has already been shaved down about 4-5mm.

The donor car only had a 2 year life span as most marketing cars do. It was a crusher from day one from Lexus and was to only serve its purpose for marketing and are not considered production vehicles so they may never be registered and will only be on dealer plates.

 

Nice upgrade man!I m almost ready to do the same.So far i ve just bought the ISF calipers.I ve found brembo rotors but i want to ask you if you are sure that i ll need ISF hubs too and also if i do that will change my wheels offset?I m on 19is now 38 offset all around.

 

wow....very nice! Wished I can get that setup

 

Nice to see all that hard work pay off

 

ahhh gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

 

Yes the hubs were checked and measured to see if we can short cut the installation to see if we can simply just do a rotor transfer. But it was a negative and swapped the arm and assembly over, which actually wasn't much work at all in the end... just 1 castle nut with pin + 2 lower 19mm bolts.

And yes in doing so you will change your offset. Your 38 that sits on the car now will actually end up being the same as having +30 offset wheels for your chassis.

 

nice upgrade~ you have awesome cars