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MG MGA - Worn brake pads!

A Club member felt his brakes were a bit suspect so he investigated (he hasn’t had the car that long). Do you think he should change the pads?
Mike


Mike Ellsmore

Only driven on Sundays-------------------lol
William Revit

I hope he wears a seat belt after the new pads are fitted because otherwise, when he first pushes the brake pedal, he may well find himself squashed up all over the dashboard! :^)

Colyn
Colyn Firth

Plenty of thickness there. Looks like other issues contributed to overheat/burn the pads.

Steve
Steve Gyles

Previous owner said they were cracking brakes?
Shanerj

Not so much worn brake pads, more a case of disintegrated pads. Never seen anything like them myself!

Anyone else found "worn brake pads" seems to be a favourite advisory of MOT stations these days? My wife received the MOT advisory, but when I removed them, I found they still had probably 18 months left in them. I still changed them as I had already bought the replacements.
A couple of weeks later a friend asked me to help change his, as he also had the same advisory. When I took them off, I found they were not even 50% worn! The interesting thing is when looking at his car (a Peugot), I was naturally wary of the experience on my wife's car, but there appeared no conclusive way of assessing the pads, without opening up the calipers.
My friend initially asked me to help as the same garage quoted approx £400 to change the pads.
Graham V

I think it may be a case of a very old set of pads, whether they were put in temporary and never changed, poorly manufactured lining material or sprayed with some adverse solvent we will never know. I have seen a few modern pads worn down by track work but never delaminating and cracking like this. The car owner reckons they might have been buried in the veggie patch for a few years before being called into service!
Mike
Mike Ellsmore

I have seen similar breakdown of brake lining material on rear shoes.

It turned out that the owner had a major leak of oil into his drums, and tried to deal with the oil contamination on the brake linings by putting the shoes onto his BBQ. They looked just like this when thy had cooled, and were scarily ineffective on braking.

Needless to say, replacement was the only remedy!
Dominic Clancy

It amazes me how insensitive some people can be to noises coming from their cars.

I once bought a car (Morris Minor woody with a front disc conversion) where the pads had actually worn all the way through the disc, which was by then just a disc of sheet metal thickness and it had detached completely from the centre of the rotor.

Wouldn't have wanted to be that driver when the disc finally parted ways with the hub..... And can you imagine the noise as it was machined away>
Bill Spohn

That's a bit like -
"How do you know when your tyres are worn out"?
When they go BANG! I have lived in a 3rd. world country!
Barry
Barry Gannon

When we had the old F series Ford based ambulances here ,pads like that and much worse were very common
You'd get them come in with brake noise after a trip down the West and pull the brakes off and find all sorts like broken pads(backing plate), pads worn out that far that the caliper pistons had welded themselves through the plates , rotors worn down from the pads falling apart that badly that one side of the rotor would be just the ends of the cooling fins left with no pad to be found and the pistons running straight on what was left of the rotor---badly cracked and burnt pads as you have there were looked on as par for the course--we even had a set of pads that were made of some weird material that a rep wanted to try for free, they didn't make the end of the day , you would swear they had been made from plastic the way they melted, the lining material just ran off them as it disintegrated and jammed up in the caliper
William Revit

This thread was discussed between 14/01/2020 and 19/01/2020

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