The first three installments of our long-term Kawasaki ZX14 project were all about making the bike go fast, culminating in last month's write-up detailing the installation of a bunch of go-fast goodies from Muzzys (including a nitrous system) that pushed output to 215hp and top speed to over 200 mph. Like any true speed freaks, we didn't give much thought to slowing this beast down-until we got to the Maxton Speed Trials for our Top Speed Shootout and guys like Dave O started scaring the crap out of us with crazy tales of brake failure they'd experienced coming down from the far side of 200 mph. It seems that is doesn't take more than a few seconds of sustained braking from those speeds to totally overheat the system, potentially warping rotors, glazing pads and boiling the brake fluid. Suddenly, our Big Ninja's stock stopping system, with its rubber lines and factory rotors and calipers had us scratching our heads.
Thankfully, the factory brakes performed more than acceptably at the Shootout and kept us from flying off the end of the runway, but there's always room for improvement over stock. So as soon as we returned from North Carolina, we hit the aftermarket to build up a braking system that was every bit as trick as the rest of the bike. Our first call was to our friends at Moto-Master USA, who were more than happy to hook us up with a pair of their just-released "Flame" front rotors ($299.95 each) to replace the stock "petal-cut" Kawi pieces. Composed of a refined, hardened chrome-moly steel alloy rotor (the material is specially formulated for a higher-friction coefficient than stock and longer wear too) mated to an aluminum carrier with floating buttons, the Flame rotors made all the right performance promises. They looked great on the bike, too, laser-cut with a hot-looking (sorry...) "flame" profile that also increases the surface area of the rotor edge for improved cooling to reduce the chance of rotor warpage.
Next we looked after the calipers, scrapping the stock Nissin four-pistons in favor of a pair of too-trick radial race calipers from Performance Machine ($499.95 polished, $549.95 chrome, plus $20 for the mounting kit specific to your bike). Built around a caliper body that is machined from solid billet aluminum for maximum rigidity (reducing flex and maintaining better alignment with the rotor for better pad contact and optimal braking), these four-piston calipers come complete with four individual sintered pads (one per piston). Four individual pads offer more leading edges, PM says, for more braking power. Extra-blingy polished finish is pure icing.
Lastly, in order to ensure that every last ounce of braking force was transferred from the Kawasaki radial master cylinder to those shiny new calipers, we binned the stock rubber brake lines and installed a set of Galfer stainless lines (approximately $100, depending on options and application), in black coating with sexy gold-anodized ends to set off our gold Galespeed wheels. In our experience, the Galfers are among the best lines in the business-Galfer's braided lines use 16 strands of steel braid (most companies use 12) wrapped around a DuPont Teflon inner lining to allow almost zero line expansion, for maximum braking force.
A few hours in the garage later, and now our Big Ninja has big braking power up front, stopping performance that is much more in keeping with the accelerative abilities of this bike and a fresh custom look too. Now we just have to get ourselves back to Maxton soon and see how it does in the 200-mph-to-zero test!