Braking is the single most important action that your car performs. It doesn’t matter how fast your car can accelerate in however many seconds. A beast of a machine that can do 0-60mph in less than 4 seconds can be the most awesome way to put yourself into a wall if your brakes don’t work properly. As important as this function is, our brakes sometimes fail, usually due to neglect.
In order to make sure that your brakes always work, you must maintain maximum friction pad depth to insure full performance of the braking system. In other words, you have to change your brake pads. Before you change them, you need to know what kind of brakes you have. There are two different types of braking systems: disc brakes and drum brakes. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but we won’t get into that. You just need to know that, on most cars, disc brakes are on the front and drum brakes are on the back. And since 90% of the brake pads that you’ll ever change in your life will be on the front; that will be our area of focus. If you liked this posting and you would like to get much more info with regards to Brake Pad Measurement kindly check out the internet site.
Disc brakes are the most effective system for stopping a vehicle. They utilize a caliper to apply the brake pads on either side of the rotor to halt wheel motion. Unless blocked by wheel rims, you can see them through the spokes on your wheels. This is the first way that you can tell if you need to do a brake reline. If the pads are less than 1/4 inch thick, you’ll need to replace them soon. If they’re less than 1/8 inch thick, get out the tools right then and there. The other way to tell that you need to reline your brakes is by listening to them. Noise-making devices are built into the pads to let you know when they need changing. If you hear a screeching sounds when you apply the brakes, you’re due for a reline. If it sounds more like metal scraping metal, you’ve probably already damaged your rotor and need to replace the pads immediately if not the rotor as well.