Over the decades, the same local repair shop has performed the annual NYS inspection on our cars; we started there when it was conveniently near to jobs at the IBM plant and continued out of habit. In the last, oh, five years or so, they’ve begun reporting all manner of Things That Need Work, ranging from “dirty fluids” to worn shocks. Oddly, none of those problems recurred from year to year and were never written up on the inspection summary; they were always phoned to Mary, who politely declined the service.
On several occasions, I’d drop off the car and walk to the mall across the road to pick up this-and-that. They’d call Mary (I don’t carry the phone), she’d say she would pass the message to me, and they would never mention the problems when I picked up the car. Huh.
Most recently, they told her the front brakes had “wafer thin” pads and the rotor disks were severely worn. She declined the service, as always. When I change the oil, I do an under-the-car lookaround and the brakes have always looked fine, but, being that type of guy, I pulled the front wheels and took a closer look at the situation:
The pads start at 7 mm and wear to a minimum thickness of 1 mm, at which point the cross-pad wear indicating groove will vanish and a little metal tab will touch the rotor and start screaming. These pads have about 2 mm left to the bottom of the grooves and are wearing evenly.
The rotors start at 28 mm thick and wear to 26 mm. These rotors measure 27.73 mm and have no serious grooves or scars.
Just for grins, I pulled the rotors and measured the thickness at the middle of the swept ring, aligned with the bolt holes:
Bottom line: the rotors match to within 0.0015 inch = 0.04 mm and have 0.0005 inch = 0.013 mm of variation around the circumference.
With 91 k miles on the OEM pads and rotors, I’d say they’re doing fine and that we don’t use the brakes nearly enough.
It may be time to start patronizing a new shop…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 