Well i just got my ford 9" put into my monte last week and it came out better than i could have hoped. i welded on my own brackets and did all the work my self so i saved a ton of money. The key was finding a rear that was the right width. Any way....

I had a 9" and a rear disk setup off an 83 fireturd sitten on a shelf in my garage. The 9" didn't have any brakes so i had to do somthin for brakes before i made the swap. I got to looking and did some measuring and it seemed that i could redrill the bolt pattern to fit the 9" patter by using the old drum backing plate as a guide. I also had the big bearing ford so i had to increase the inner diameter of the hole in the backing plate as well. The other problem i ran into was that the disk backing plate was about .1 inches thicker than than the factory drum backing plate so there was a small amount of slop in the bearing. To fix this i took the outter shell of the old axle bearing which needed replaced anyway and cut it length ways with a cuttoff wheel. Then ground it down with a grinder to the desired thickness. I know this sounds like knuckdraging technology but it worked great. I took the new bearing spacer and put it in behind the bearing and it spaced out the bearing just enough to take the slop out.
Here is the kicker the stock rear disk have way too much "offset" or i guess it would be called hat depth. They would hit the backing plate and wouldn't even come close to fitting. Ends up I had some front disk off a 91 4X4 s-10 so i started measuring and they are the same diameter as the rear disk off the fireturd except they had less backspacing to them so they ended up working perfectly. So i used the firebird backing plate and calipers with s-10 front rotors and i had the stock 9" bolt patter already redrilled already for my car. I had about 50 bucks worth of parts in it. I'll try to have pics up later today. Let me know what you think.

 

Sounds like a project that's working out. It's just that fact of mixing and matching parts to get what you want to work.

Consider doing a tech article.

 

That is cool, and some pics with explanations would be much appreciated. That is a lot better than junkyard hunting for 4 disk Z28, for weeks, but then again, you need the Thirdgen caliper. It still eliminates a lot of the unnessary store botten parts.

 

Just flippin' through you page, Stephen. You did a number on the 383!!! lol...

 

Here are some pics sorry bout the messy bench didn't think it would be that hard to see the parts on it.

 

more

 

I have more pics but its not letting me post them for some reason.

 

more pics