Publisher's Note: Welcome to our 35th edition of Tech Tips Tuesday on "Decoding Brake Pad Wear: Insights and Solutions".  We'll be re-publishing an edition of AMSOIL Tech Tips for you every Tuesday.  Click on the Blog Category "Tuesday Tech Tips" to see everything published to-date.

Decoding Brake Pad Wear: Insights and Solutions

John Gardner: Now, when you're performing a brake job, it's a good idea to take a good look at your brake pads. They can tell you what's going on with your entire brake system. Welcome to this AMSOIL Tech Tip on reading brake pads.

Well, they can tell you a lot, and you can see it right here. Starting on this first one, you've got inner pad wear. Now, your inner pad wear, because of the floating and moving calipers, is probably due to your slides sticking, or it's not moving, and your inner pad's going to wear out. You've got tapered wear here, which is usually caused by misinstalling the pad, and the pad's kind of off-center there on your rotor, or your actual caliper itself. That's a problem. It starts to get hot, starts to burn up. You get actual glazing, crackling, or lifted edges here.

And then this one's pretty cool. It's overlapping friction material. Now, I'll give you a better look right here on the table. What are they supposed to look like? Here's one right here, which is a brand-new pad. It looks good. You've got a high coefficient of friction.

Your next one, well, this is actually glazed. You can see it's all shiny, and it's also tapered; it's bigger on this side than that side. This one, well, it's pretty obvious it's all chunked up. And then the cool one right here is that overlapping. Now, what is that? That's because the rotor was actually too small, and you can see it's not even touching it on that surface right there. What happens is, you have that overlapping.

Now, no matter if you're replacing the pads or doing anything with your brakes, you have to keep it clean. Len, you know what the number one cause of brake squeal is?

Len Groom: I'm thinking it's going to be dirt.

John Gardner: Absolutely, dirt or loose pads. Now, you've got a product that's going to keep the brakes clean, not only at the end of the job but during it as well.

Len Groom: Exactly, you want to use brake cleaner to clean that dust out of there. Spray everything down real nicely. You want to avoid compressed air; you don't want to put all those contaminants in the environment. But you hit it with the brake clean, it'll bring it all right to the floor. That solvent will help clean all that dirt off there, and you start out with a nice clean brake job.

John Gardner: Yeah, and think about that. I mean, I just touched these brake pads, I mean, barely touched it, and you guys can see that's all on my hands. Not to mention the grease, the dirt from working on the car. That stuff's going to get transferred from the pad to the rotor. There's my coefficient of friction, big old word for saying, hey, it's not going to do the stopping.

Len Groom: Exactly, you want to make sure everything's clean.