Brake squeal

[davefiddes]

Hi,

My front brakes seem to be squealing quite a bit at low speed (>10 mph) when they are cold...mostly when I pull up to traffic lights in town. Is this normal?

I'm running AP brakes with Mintex pads. The anti-squeal plate is fitted to the trailing edge side of the pads which I think is right.

I've not done a huge amount of braking but the car has done a few hundred miles now so I would have thought that the disc and pads would be fairly well bedded in???

[ultimasimon]

I have exactly the same problem. Gonna check this when the car comes back from the factory.

If not a strip and clean with a few lashings of brake cleaner and a small application of copperease should do the trick.

[davejw]

I've heard that grooved discs will cure this as it's more to do with the gasses under the pad surface than any rattle on the pad/caliper seat.

Am no expert but did suffer this on a 911 which didn't have grooves but blocked up holes. Cleaning the holes and rounding the edges of the pads fixed the squeal for a while (until the holes blocked up again and the pads wore down).

If nothing else, rounding the edges of the pads is something to try.

Dave.

[gdr]

I discussed pads with AP and they reckoned the Mintex 1155s were maybe prone to squeal. I have fitted DS2500s, they are quiet.

[canam-phil]

davejw said:

I've heard that grooved discs will cure this as it's more to do with the gasses under the pad surface than any rattle on the pad/caliper seat. Dave.

I can see the gassing theory might apply to high speed squeal but dave f is having low speed squeal problems (<10mph)

[davefiddes]

Thanks for the replies. I've checked that the disks are clean and I kept the pads in their original boxes till shortly before SVA so I'm pretty sure they don't have any contamination.

It's definitely a low speed problem. Once I'm moving at all the brakes are very progressive and make no significant noise either under hard or light braking.

I guess it must be the Mintex competition pads. Once the brakes have been warmed up a bit (driving down a B-road along the edges of square fields is hard on brakes) then they seemed to be fine pulling up. After a bit of town running or cruising on a fast A-road they are back to squealing.

I'll maybe look at getting hold of DS2500 pads at some point. Didn't someone say a few months back that they were a bit softer on the disks as well. I'm assuming that the stopping power it comparable with the Mintex pads???

[gdr]

Not an expert and have not driven the car with the 1155 pads so can't compare 2 types of pads.
The DS2500s work well if a little bit wooden when cold (but not noisy). The brake feel certainly improves once they warm up a little bit. On my one and only track outing brakes excellent at all times.
Got the Ferodo pads from Demon Tweeks, pn FRP216H, £70 per set.

[davefiddes]

gdr said:

Got the Ferodo pads from Demon Tweeks, pn FRP216H, £70 per set.

Thanks for the part number.

I'm planning on doing a few track days next month time permitting. I'll probably just run with my existing pads then and perhaps give the DS2500s a shot in July and report back.