BRAKE TECH
With EBC’s brake guru Gary Taylor on hand, it would have been rude not to grill him on bra king…
Do people still glaze pads?
Yes, it still happens, but mostly on the road from not having hard enough usage. Brakes are made to be used hard, and they’re designed to be squeezed! A glazed pad will be super shiny, like a cylinder’s bore if you run a bike at low revs for lots of miles – that too will cause glazing. The pad needs to be a little rough to maximise purchase, so if you’ve got a squeak or a squeal, chances are it’s because they’re glazed. Take the pads out and lightly rough them up on a sheet of fine sand paper until the mirrored effect is gone.
Why do pads wear unevenly?
Some calipers are designed to have a leading edge (you might have a large piston next to a smaller piston in the same caliper, which can promote this), but uneven wearing is mostly down to sticking pistons and/or poor caliper servicing. If your pads are wearing unevenly, give your calipers a thorough check over and clean.
How do you bed fresh pads?
It’s important to get this process right. With new pads, you don’t want to apply the brake and hold it on for any length of time as it gets the pad too hot, too quick; you want to match the face of the pad with the face of the disc, so if your disc is badly worn, it will take longer. If the disc and pads are brand new, they’ll bed in a lot better. The first 25-30 miles on the road the pad will feel vague, but after that, as long as it’s not too hot, the braking power will improve drastically, and the more heat cycles they go through the better they get. It’s quite similar to a tyre, only you can’t really have too many heat cycles on a pad, though.
Do pads have a shelf life?
Not really. There is no use-by date on a pad, but technology moves on constantly, so it pays to have relatively recent products in your calipers if you’re after the best stopping performance. But if you buy a set of 10-year-old pads, they’ll still be fine to use, assuming they’ve been stored correctly.
Wavy or plain – which discs are best?
The original theory of wavy discs was to clean the face of the pad, but the design also helped to cool the disc quicker. Some wavy discs have got very aggressive of late, with very deep recesses that limit the material that contacts with the pad. Personally, I prefer the conventional cylindrical disc as you ideally want the biggest amount of pad to be hitting the disc for the ultimate stopping power. However, this produces more heat. It’s a bit of a catch-22. A thicker disc will hold the heat more and if it’s of a non-floating design, the rotor will hold the heat as well, which is why floating discs work better.
If you have a rotor on a hub, connected by the bobbins (as we call them at EBC), they cool the discs down quicker. We still make floating discs, but they’re not as free floating as they used to be, because we’ve learned it’s not necessary to make them that way.
Why do discs warp, and can you correct them?
There are lots of different explanations for warping – it can be caused simply by poor storage. We like our discs to be stored flat and surrounded by foam. Another reason can be if they get too hot, so if you stop on the way to a traffic light, and keep the brake on while stopped, the heat gathering can apply a hot spot, which can just knock it out ever so slightly. Another reason, and probably the most obvious, is a collision or a crash, so always check them. As far as trying to bring them back, we’d advise against it; discs are so thin it’s not worth the risk, so you should go for a replacement. We’d also say about changing the whole disc and bobbin set, rather than the outer disc.