Braking material coming off of brake pads

lordrobs · 4 Dec 2006 at 11:21

Is this a common occurance or am I just unlucky?

I was about 300 yards away from home this morning, touched the brakes and was greeted with a *bang* *scraaaaappeeeee* "oh fiddlesticks*" Had a look expecting the wheel to be like / but all seemed ok. Tried rocking wheel and it was solid as a rock.

After limping the car home at 3mph I touched the brakes to stop outside my house and the pedel felt very spongy, had a look and where I did have 5mm of braking material I now had the metal backing touching the disc

Not entirely sure how I'm going to get the car to see the car doctor

*another F word may have been used at the time

FireBIade · 4 Dec 2006 at 11:25

Sounds like the pad material cracked/shattered and dropped away, think this may be caused by a few things like not running them in properly from new or a manufacturing defect, probably there are loads of others as well.

Dogbreath · 4 Dec 2006 at 13:56

Cheap pads used hard can suffer from this, the thermal cycling causes the bond between friction material and metal backing to fail, epsecialy when the friction material is starting to get thin.

lordrobs · 7 Dec 2006 at 13:46

Well my mechanic / family friend came round last night to sort it out and heres the result-

as you can see one of the holes has no material in it where it broke out and just above that is a patch of bare metal. The rest of the pad still has the braking material on it but it appears to have sheared off :eek:

The pad behind is from the inside caliper and shows how much pad was on there.

Anyway all sorted now so I can stop driving the gf's Polo

FrK` · 7 Dec 2006 at 14:02

dont breath that dusty stuff in

silversurfer · 7 Dec 2006 at 14:59

Did he check the calipers are in good condition. Uneven wear can be down to a sticking caliper guide pin. Either way it should all be regreased when doing the pads

jimblowscash · 7 Dec 2006 at 15:23

had you been using the breaks hard and then splashing through puddles? rapid expansion / contraction can do this to std pads, also do you know how long theve been on the car for?

its not that uncommon to have this happen, the pad material doesnt expand and contract like the metal backing and does sometimes dissintergrate

lordrobs · 7 Dec 2006 at 15:34

silversurfer said:
Did he check the calipers are in good condition. Uneven wear can be down to a sticking caliper guide pin. Either way it should all be regreased when doing the pads

He mentioned that and said all seemed to be fine. Yeah he re-greased it all too.

had you been using the breaks hard and then splashing through puddles? rapid expansion / contraction can do this to std pads, also do you know how long theve been on the car for?

More than likely

I think they have been on for about 9 months but I could be wrong.

Dogbreath · 7 Dec 2006 at 17:59

FrK` said:
dont breath that dusty stuff in

Did you think he would maybe snort some just to see what it was like?

There is no asbestos in modern pads BTW, though inhaling the dusts would still be pretty stupid thing to do.

lordrobs · 7 Dec 2006 at 21:47

Dogbreath said:
Did you think he would maybe snort some just to see what it was like?

er.... yeah I mean who'd be stupid enough to try that.... *whistles*