How to Bed-in / Burnish Brake Pads and Rotors
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 พ.ค. 2024
- Properly preparing your pads and discs for the racetrack is critical for maximizing their performance and longevity. This video will show you how to do it the right way.
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10:29 u welcome!
Ty
Thanks, i hate videos that take ages to explain
When doing this constantly check your rear view mirror. If you have a performance car chances are you can out stop whoever is behind you. Great video!
I learned so damn much from this video. Thank you.
No worries. Glad we could be of help!
We want to take this time to THANK YOU VERY MUCH for providing your expertise in explaining the proper way to bed-in. Our small corvette cub has learned a lot to day as we want to always learn how to do things right.
Our pleasure! Glad we could help you and your members. :)
Very informative video! Thanks for putting this together.
Great video very well informative!
Awesome bro! I put new pads and slotted drilled rotors on my wife's and I 300s (detroit axle) and the squeeling was terrible so I did the bed in process and it worked great. It was fun too!! Very helpful my friend. And I will do it o a regular like you said too!!
Awesome! Glad you had fun during the process, and that you're wife doesn't have squealing brakes. Happy wife=happy life.
I bed my EBC race rotors and brakes, have lasted a very long time now, consistent braking. This was one of the videos I watched before hand.
An interesting watch. Thank you.
Thanks. Informative and well presented
Great job, thank you for sharing!
Thanks for your detailed video! Very educational!!👍
Great video, great effort, great explanation, and worth watching to the very end. I will be applying what I learned here on my cars.
Thanks so much! We're planning to get our ish together and make some more of these very soon. Thanks for the kind words and support!
Thanks dude! I needed this, no one is talking about this!
I just brought some brakes for my Honda Accord.
They are Ceramic Street Pads. They Started Smoking and I thought I did something wrong. I freaked out!
I didnt know I was breaking them in. I guess I will get up to speed and let them bad babies smoke!
Glad we could help!
Fantastic video. I honestly couldn't think of a single question to ask after the video ended. Love what you guys do and how you address the community. Please keep it up and know that it's appreciated. Thanks!
Thank you very much for your support and kind words!
Really helpful video. Thanks Jeff. I will be sure to do this when I get my BBKs delivered by Apex.
Make sure to send us an update/review with some pics! Hope they're working well for you!
This is an excellent video, a must watch for any performance vehicle owner.
Thanks and glad you enjoyed it!
Like everything, you need to keep doing it.
LOVE IT!
Thank You!
Do you do the bed in straight away or do you drive 200 + miles normal driving first then the hard stops after? Thank you
How long for the cooling down part ? Thank you
Really great illustration. I'm thinking the same procedure goes for new rotors with existing pads or do you recommend replacing both together on a street car?
Any time you swap pads or discs you'll need to make those two surfaces flush with each other again. You don't necessarily have to buy new pads and discs at the same time though. If you do have an used disc with fresh pads, just make sure you clean all the old pad material off the discs before laying down another transfer layer. Please see our other video on swapping between street and race pads for complete details! Thanks.
Thank you for this video! This was very helpful and the details are appreciated. Question: just bought a used Lotus Evora with the AP Racing set-up (original stock) New pads now installed not sure what pads. Rotors have a bad glaze on them -- grabby. Can I remove rotors my for slight cutting/turning, lightly sand off pads, re-install all 4 and then do a bed-in process?
Have you watched our other "Swapping Between street and track pads" video.. If not, check that out and it will explain what I'm about to suggest. If you have aggressive race pads, you can just run them cold and that will scrape off a good bit of pad material. If not, yes you can pull the discs for some light sanding in preparation for the bed-in cycle with the new pads. Mixing brands of pads, and sometimes even compounds within a single brand, can be dicey. Sometimes the differing pad materials just don't play nice on the disc face, and can cause high spots, judder, etc.
I'm not trying to achieve those heat spots 19:07, still best video for this on TH-cam
update drilled sloted brake noise. both fronts had the inner splash guard scraping the rotor slightly. lol. the brakes are great!
Thanks, for the info.
Quick question, what if the rotor and pads are not replaced at the same time? does that change any part of the process?
+Shaun Miller Regardless of whether you're changing pads or discs, you still need to prepare/bed them in. The disc is the most critical aspect however. When you install fresh iron discs, that's when you'll see the greatest benefit from bedding. If you're starting with a used disc, you should make sure the surface of the disc is clean before bedding in your pads. Please see our other video on swapping between street and race friction. If you try laying down pad material on top of other pad material, you run the risk of an incompatibility which can cause judder/vibration.
Thought that guy looked familiar - Jeff Ritter - former StopTech dude! Great vid.
Guilty as charged! Thank you sir.
Any need to change brake fluid afterwards? I’d imagine you’d be cooking your DOT 3 pretty quick in just a couple bedding sessions. Do higher boiling point fluids negate that worry?
Bed-in cycles shouldn't get your fluid hot enough to boil. We always suggest a good quality fluid like Ferodo Super Formula or AP Racing R2 or higher to ensure no problems. When you go to the track, the sustained high temps of doing this type of braking for 20 minutes at a time or more are what kill the fluid. With bed-in, you're typically backing off just when the brakes start reaching the temps at which boiling could occur.
thanks this video was great..im looking into motorcycle brake bed in but this was a great principles video..thanks for taking the time.
Thank you! Yes, the same principles apply. Add heat, compress the time, pads stick to discs...easy! :)
Man it's hard to brake in a big brake kit with ferodo ds2500's on the street. Gonna have to do another heat cycle at a higher speed I think. Thanks for the vid Essex Parts.
Make sure you block off your brake ducts to get as much heat into the discs as possible. Also, doing a little left foot braking as you head to your bed-in location can build some extra heat up before you start the cycle.
Do you have to do it immediately after fitting them? What if the shop is in the middle of a crowded city and there are speed limitations/ and restricted space?
What if I wash the car does this layer stay on?
Or
Do I need to do this only at the track and every time before taking it to the limit this is how to ‘warm up’ the brakes?
Can this be done even if the disc and pad were already on for like 9-10k miles?
The racetrack is the ideal spot. A deserted country road would be a close second. Doing this on crowded urban streets would be dangerous and not recommended.
You'll need to rebed them occasionally to keep the transfer layer on the discs. It wears off over time while driving cold on the street.
Yes, the pads don't have to be brand new to do this process. They can be any age.
Any special considerations if you have slotted/drilled rotors vs. solid iron?
No sir. You can treat plain face discs, drilled, slotted, drilled & slotted, J Hook slot, etc. all the same way.
Great, thanks!
Is there some metod to hold the brake for like 15sec while having foot on gas ? To not to stop, but yust brake while having constant speed ? Thx
Yes. Dragging the brakes with the left foot can rapidly build heat and speed up the bed-in process. That said, if you've never practiced left foot braking, public roads are not a place to learn...very dangerous, and you run the risk of pushing with the wrong foot!
What do I do if the process wasnt done correctly? Basically I had a dealership put on new pads and rotors for me and I was told they were properly bed in and I was fine to drive away. After a few weeks of normal driving I went for a spirited drive and found that there was minimal bite and lots of brake fade. Subaru STi with StopTech Slotted rotors and Hawk HPS+ pads
There may not be anything 'wrong' with the pads. Hawk HPS+ are not known for tremendous bite. They are more known for loud squealing and dust! :) After a few weeks of driving, the pad transfer layer gradually wears off. You just need to re-bed them. That will happen with any pads. As shown in the video, driving around with the brake cold will gradually strip the transfer layer off of the discs.
Fade is a different issue, and there are two different types of fade. If the pedal is hard but the car won't slow down, that's pad fade. That means you're exceeding the pad's max operating temperature (MOT). You need a pad with a higher MOT. Something like Ferodo DS2500 would be an excellent choice for spirited driving, autoX, etc. If you press the pedal and it's mushy and goes to the floor, that is fluid fade. That means you boiled your fluid and have compressible air bubbles in your lines. In that case, you need to bleed the brakes with a high quality fluid. AP Racing R2 would be a good choice.
Hopefully that helps! Thanks.
Essex Parts Services, Inc. Thanks, that helps. Your comment about the squealing and dust has me concerned though because the pads that are on there now are extremely quiet and produce almost no dust. Even when I first got the car back from having the work done there was zero noise coming from the brakes and the wheels are clean for weeks.
would you recommend installation of the rear rotors and pads first and leaving the old stock front rotors and pads to help with the rear bed in cycle?
+joshua slomba We would suggest swapping the fronts and rears at the same time if you're planning to change all four corners. No sense in having to do the whole process twice.
Is it normal to get a strong pad smell while doing this process?
Yes, once the pads start getting hot enough to transfer to the discs they start to smell quite a bit. After that they begin to smoke.
how about brake pads that says they do not need transfer layer ? like CL brakes RC5+ or other ? is that just a wish of the manufacturer or they really works different way ? Thank you !
Sintered pads like CL Brakes do work in a different way. They are consistently in a more abrasive mode, not an adherent mode. The material composition of the pads is very different, as is the way they are bonded to the backing plate. They don't stick to the disc face nearly as much as organic or semi-metallic pads. Sintered pads also tend to be more harsh on discs.
Is this just for all pads & discs or does it depend on brands ect
The same basic procedure applies to all pads and discs. How many stops and how much heat you need to pour into them will vary by pad compound though. Race pads will require more heat, and street pads considerably less.
New ceramics on new drilled slotted rotors, I have serious grinding. only drove around the block this far.
WTH, because all I hear is about the squiellng noise. Ain't got that, just grinding. Rotors seems to be receiving even abrasion upon their surfaces but this grind worried me driving and braking.
Help, anybody????
The drill holes in the discs may be what you're feeling. All of those perforations are specifically designed to create more leading edges for the pads to bite into. When you put in a fresh set of pads, they won't be mated to the disc surface. As you bed them in, the pads will conform and sit flush with the disc face. As that occurs, my hunch the grinding noise and chatter will go away to a large extent. With slotted or drilled discs however, you almost always have some small amount of whirring noises, etc. as the discs spin. All of the edges of the drill holes or slots scrape the pads. If you drive next to a wall with your window down you'll hear those noises reflected back at you.
Are ceramic pad different as far as the bed in process?
If you're talking about ceramic pads on iron discs (as opposed to pads used on carbon ceramic discs), the process is pretty much the same as what is shown in the video. You just need to get them hot enough to start transferring to the disc. Pads marketed as 'ceramic' are typically some of the mildest pads available, geared towards quiet operation and low dust. They typically have a fairly low max operating temperature, and therefore likely won't need as much heat in them to start transferring material as many other types of pad.
Doing this procedure every few weeks, as you suggest, seems like it would go through pads very quickly. Is it even worth it for the benefits to an average driver?
If you're just chasing groceries, then no, I wouldn't invest a ton of time in this procedure. However, if you're chasing lap times on a road course or autoX, then it is absolutely worth the time. You actually won't burn through pads as fast as you think. A simple rule of thumb would be that you can expect to burn through 1mm of pad material for every 20 minute track session if your system is running in the proper temperature range for your chosen compound. The stops in a road course session would typically be from a higher speed, and you'd have more of them in a row. A handful of stops from 60mph isn't going to wear the pads out that quickly. You're just taking a little cut off of the surface and transferring it to the disc face.
Can you just hold the brake and drive forward? Brake drag?
I sometimes left foot brake to build some extra heat up in the brakes before I go into my cycle of stops. You can probably get enough heat into a set of mild street pads via left foot braking to get some pad transfer to the disc face. However, it's going to be tough to do so with a set of race pads since they have a much higher max operating temperature. They need more energy poured into them to heat them up to those temps. That energy comes from speed. A high speed stop transfers more energy from the motion of the spinning disc into heat, during a shorter period of time. So with race pads, you simply may not be able to get the pads hot enough to transfer to the disc unless you are spiking them from a high speed.
Essex Parts Services, Inc. But if you are flooring the car at a high rpm at say 1st gear and brake dragging so the car is actually moving too wouldn't this heat up the brakes?
Also can you just do that along with accelerating fast then braking hard and repeating until the gas tank is gone?
The disc spins at the speed at which the car is moving. In first gear you'd be limited to something like 25mph. When you're doing 100mph, the disc is rotating at a much higher rate. The amount of energy being converted from kinetic energy to heat is speed dependent, and goes up at an exponential rate with speed. Mass x velocity squared. So as speed increases, the amount of kinetic energy being converted to heat goes up very quickly. If you'd like to understand the "why" behind the 'how' in more depth, see if you can find a used copy of this book at a reasonable price: www.amazon.com/High-Performance-Brake-Systems-Installation-2007-02-01/dp/B01K2WH6EI/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1485286220&sr=8-6&keywords=james+walker+jr.
You definitely don't need to use a whole tank of gas. Ten stops from 60mph is usually plenty for street pads, and from a slightly higher speed with race pads.
What kind of car is this? Chevy ss gauge cluster, but you have corvette calipers, is their a ss corvette? I didn't think so. Also the back doesn't look like a vette, I'm guessing trailblazer.
The demo car in the video is a 2003 Corvette Z06. Chevy used similar same gauge clusters across a wide range of cars...hence all the complaints from Corvette customers, and why they've been bringing up the quality level on the interior (check out a C7 vette, which is a giant upgrade over the C5 vette).
+Essex Parts Services, Inc. If you are purchasing a system that has the ability to hold a lot of heat with high friction (like a Radi-cal system on the example c5 z06 you demoed with stock calipers), would you not be best served to use the first session of an HPDE to bed? I ask this as someone who would be somewhat DD'ing a car and driving it to an HPDE. While you can change pads and rotors at the track to a set that has already been burnished, a non-changed or street set would have gone through many abrasive cycles and returned to unburnished. It would seem hard to maintain a transfer layer on a car that does double duty. In that situation, it would then seem best to use a first session to burnish in a controlled environment.
Do you have suggestions for the weekend warrior attempting to get the most out of his/her brakes but cannot safely get or maintain that transfer layer on a higher temp setup, like +Essex Parts Services, Inc. provides for the c5 z06?
Thank you for your time and I really appreciate your quality videos.
Did you watch our other video on swapping between street and race friction? We made that one specifically for folks in your situation: th-cam.com/video/ONpSpWcy0V0/w-d-xo.html
For a properly designed BBK, it will indeed be more difficult to get adequate heat built up in the system, since everything is designed to resist exactly that. One solution would be to completely block off your brake duct inlets (tape over them). Another solution would be to do some left foot braking to build some heat into the pads before you even start the decel cycles. I've done that with race pads at times as I drove out to my remote bed-in spot. Ultimately though, you may need to reach speeds that are only safely and legally achievable on a racetrack, so the first session of a track day would be a good time to do the bed-in. As you mentioned, it is a more controlled environment.
As a general rule, when swapping between brands or pad types, you want to try and clean the discs off first, then bed on a fresh disc face. The only time it's okay to not clean the disc face first would be if the pad materials you're swapping between are very similar. For example, Ferodo DS2500 (street/autoX) has the same core materials as their full out race pads (DS1.11 or DSUNO). In that case, you can skip the 'cleaning' step, and just do some 50-75% laps in your first session to seat the DS1.11 or DSUNO race pads properly on the disc. The same goes for pads like the Mintex F8R, F10R, F11R. They're all in the same family, and have the same core materials but in different ratios, with some minor tweaks or additives. If you're swapping brands between street and track however, not cleaning off your discs first by running them cold with an abrasive pad is a recipe for uneven pad deposits, judder, and vibration.
Thanks and feel free to contact us any time for more assistance.
+Essex Parts Services, Inc. Ah, my apologies. I had not watched all the videos you had produced yet. I will complete that action.
Specifically for the more street/HPDE/time trials car, it still sounds like it may be better to have a matched pad/rotor combo for both street (1) and HPDE(2) that allows the burnishing to remain to the specific application.
I am sure this may be covered on your web site, as that was very verbose, and I have not completed my read of that yet, either.
I appreciate your feedback. Once I have moved past the research and planning phase (braking comes after vehicle), I will ensure to give you a call.
Thank you for your time!
No worries at all. We do have a lot of material to sift through!
Some of our customers do have a matched pad and disc set for different environments. That is certainly the cleanest, most ideal way to handle the swapping if your budget allows. It avoids all possibility of cross-contamination, and ensures that you're always prepped for the task at hand.
Is this still necessary if I never plan to track my car?
The biggest benefit you'd see on a street-only car would be noise reduction. Many times the squealing noises that pads make are caused by there not being any pad material on the disc face. When you bed the pads in, they're mated up with the disc face properly, and squeal is eliminated.
I did not "bed" them but I broke them in per the instructions on the Power Brake box. 40 mph-10 mph 5 times and 35 mph to 5 mph 5 times. But that didn't leave any pad material on the rotors. If they start to make noise I will get in to them at higher speeds. Thanks for your comment
.
+Mike Eames buy some fremax or icer pads. they're already Scorched. makes it easier to do
I presume it's the same process with resurfaced rotors?
+Morgan Mansfield Yes, the process would be the same. Thanks!
Ds2500 pad recommend 15 to 25 trail brake, but it also saids that heat up too fast will glaze the brake pad. So with a factory big one piston Cali por, what kind of speed will you recommend?
Every compound is different, and it's tough to recommend a precise speed. You just need to go hard enough on whatever pad you have installed to get them to transfer. As in the vid, the first sign will be smell....then you'll see smoke. By the time they get to that point, they're hot enough that they're sticking pretty well. If you hit higher speeds, you need to do less cycles. If you do lower speeds, you'll need more cycles. Think of your starting speed as how much energy you're putting into your stop. The higher that speed, the more energy you're converting from spinning motion to heat. In other words, 5 stops from 100mph down to 50mph pours a lot more heat into your brakes than 5 stops from 50mph- 0mph, even though the net drop is 50mph. The discs are spinning around many more times per second at the higher speed. Your number of required stops will depend on the starting speed. Hopefully that makes sense.
For race pads instead of doing super stops to get them to temp.
Why not apply and drag your brakes on a straight at say 60-80mph till they heat up and then get onto the short stops 5 or 6 times. What’s wrong with doing this? Should get them up to temp easier, safer and more consistently than doing hard stops.
Can someone explain the flaw in this logic?
One of the key aspects of getting enough heat into the pads to develop a proper pad transfer layer on the discs is speed. The faster the speed is from which you're stopping, the more energy in that stop. The amount of energy that is converted from the kinetic energy of the spinning disc into heat is directly related to the velocity: F= MV^2
The faster the car is traveling, the more energy is poured into the stop.
Left foot braking would be a good way to warm the pads up through the initial few hundred degrees, and would reduce the overall number of stops that would be required for a good bed-in. With race pads in particular however, you likely wouldn't be able to get the pads hot enough to get them sticking on the disc face via left foot braking.
The other problem with left foot braking is that most people are terrible at it! :) They jerk, lunge, and generally put everyone around them in danger. As such, we're reluctant to recommend it.
Any special differences with carbon ceramic brakes?
Yes, our recommendation would be to follow your pad and disc manufacturers' recommended procedure. The concepts are essentially the same, but some of them have very precise recommendations based on the material they use.
The example pads @ 19:30 look like nissan k11 front brake pads. lol
Great video thank you but what the hell was that at the end lol
That would be the ever-elusive Ferodo Brake Pad Ninja!
Good info, was not aware that adhesive layer may wear off over time.
so to avoid all this go buy CL pads :)
Good info but the guy must be doing the vid in the back room or an arcade, the sound is so distracting and over power his voice. Just your voice alone will be fine.
Noted and thanks for the input! It was one of the first videos we ever did...we're learning!