ajg617

Sorry to keep harping on this, but has anyone on this forum had a brake rotor separate into two pieces (while driving) with the braking surface separating from the hub on their passenger vehicle? I'm getting to feel this is a pretty uncommon occurrance for a street vehicle but I'm particularly interested in 1998 model year.

Thanks,
AJG617

Joseph H. Smith

When you look at the set up the only way for the hub to actually seperate while installed is for the spindle nut to com off or the spindle to break in two. The spindle nut holds the hub together and the 4 bolts on the back of the hub hold it on the nuckle. My truck spit out all of the ***** inside the hub on the drivers side as they dried out but would not come apart, which is a good thing.

2RamsNoCash

I have replaced a couple of cars rotors up here that had seperated as well as a 96 chevy halfton that had wrong pads on.one of the cars it seemed to fracture away the other one the wasted pad ground up.I live in NH and VT and I feel its the hills and mountains that waste pads.after a long grade like 125 in vt from middlebury to hancock my brakes smell I usually set truck in neutral and keep speed under 35 on this type of grade.If I leave in gear it stops harder.I think a exhaust brake would help alot.my 98 loves pads i get about 30k out of them.

ScottN

Sounds like something isn't right...

I've got about 65,000 miles out of my last set of brake pads on the front - and they look nearly new. Most of the time I'm not in the city, I'm heading for the mountains. I've pulled 14,000 lb fiver's over the Coquihalla (one of the grades = 8% for 17 kms, or something so ridiculous... the max grade is 12% I believe), sans problem (though, as I don't have an exhaust brake, the max grade had me downshifted into second gear riding 40 km/h, even though the legal speed limit was 110 km/h - even at 40, I still had to nub the brakes from time to time).

If your driving technique makes brakes smoke... that's really dangerous. Any grade of non-nominal length, you should be able to approach in a way that, if the grade were of infinity length, you could keep going down it safely. That means using the engine to brake on most grades.

I generally downshift in the city as well, and probably use, on average, 20-40% of the braking other people use. It also saves fuel, because I'm slowing down earlier (instead of using fuel all the way to the redlight, I'm off the throttle earlier), I get places just as fast, and it is safer (good habit for icy roads, well, downshifting must be careful... but slowing down earlier).

SIXSLUG

There was a post on here a while back of a guy's brake rotor that split longitudally down the middle. If I remember correctly he thought it was due to road salting in the northeast combined with running an over spec'd (worn out) rotor. There was a picture posted of this and it looked odd but it has happened to someone else.