Thread: WARPED ROTORS
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  #32  
Old 02-27-2006, 07:37 PM
Aragorn Aragorn is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 17
generally what people call "warped disks" or "Warped rotors" isnt warping at all

it is caused by uneven wear yes, but not thru warping,

the cause is pad material being deposited on the disk surface when the disk is hot, this is caused by coming to a stop after hard braking or a hard drive where the brakes are very hot, and leaving the brakes engaged (ie keeping your foot on the brake pedal) when u come to a complete stop, the brake pad being clamped hard against the red hot disk causes a small amount of pad material to be deposited onto the surface of the disk. If you look at your disk you can often see the imprint of the brake pad on the disk where this has happened. This material becomes very hard and doesnt wear down as quickly as the rest of the disk (its known as cementite) and eventually causes a high spot and therefore runout on the disk, if it gets bad enough it will start shuddering thru the brake pedal and the steering

if you catch it early u can often clear it by doing 5 to 10 hard braking manoevers from about 60mph to about 5mph, with normal accelleration between them then once youve done that driving without using the brakes for a good 10-20mins to let them properly cool down again

Best way to avoid it happening is to release the brake pedal just before coming to a complete stop if the brakes have been taking a beating (ie backroad jaunt or a hard 70-0 stop), this is also most important after fitting new disks and pads as the new disks generate a lot more heat when they are bedding in and therefore are much more susceptible to cementite forming from pad deposits, and explains why the guy in the first post had the "warping"
reoccurring within only a few k of fitting the new rotors and pads

Cheers

Kevin
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