Would drilling the rotors help to keep the pads from glazing and squeaking? I read in another post that drilled rotors help to keep the pad faces clean. I am just wondering if this is true, as I am considering trying it?
Thanks,
Brandon
I am considering getting a new rotor and having it surfaced and drilled...anybody have this done?
also, I have been adjusting my brake adjusting screw twice-a-day all week and through trial and error I have greatly reduced the squeaking
Yes. Drilling, slotting or resurfacing the rotors will stop the squeaks, and for quite a while. It's after the rotors get smoothed, or polished, from the braking action that it becomes a hard-to-cure problem.
Switching to aggressive pads will unsettle the rotor surface, similar to having it resurfaced, and this used to be the cure. It just appears that we're having a harder time finding these helpful disc pucks, now. Honda's own would polish the rotors quite well, after the initial crown wore off the pucks. If you re-beveled the puck, and added a deep pair of hacksaw cuts across the face in an "X", this would again unsettle the disc surface and remove the polish, by breaking tiny edge pieces of the pads away and unsettling the disc-pad surfaces. But, Honda's pucks were softer than the current EBC pucks (at least, the EBC pucks I have), and didn't glaze to glass so easily.
If we are stuck with only the EBC-type pucks, which I suspect are made for the more modern bikes with slotted rotors, which also require harder pucks to prevent shearing while riding over those slots, then we will be stuck with having to either resurface, drill, or slot our rotors to use these pucks.
If, though, we can find disc pucks that are like the famous "ride in the rain" variety that first appeared for these bikes (and, they were from EBC, in the 1980s), these pucks are what we all could use. They have rather large bits of bronze in them that tend to chunk out with use. These cause abberations in the surface that also slightly scratch up the disc while breaking up the glass on the puck. These pucks are the reason that my front disc now measures only 5.0 mm thick (worn down to Honda's service limit), but it took over 100,000 miles and 3 sets of these aggressive pucks to get me here, so it's a good trade. I'm not going to change the disc: modern bikes use discs of 3mm with no problems. Honda just didn't know how thick the first-ever disc needed to be, so they went overboard on these bikes. This does give us all lots of room to resurface them, if there were someone who actually WOULD resurface them. (Anyone know of someone who can?)
