Last week, I had to take the car for MOT and given that the front brake disks were starting to look a bit tired after a bit of abuse over the last couple of years, I thought it would be a good time to change them.
Before I started on the brakes though, I spent a fair amount of time reorganising the garage - with the weather becoming less cooperative, I decided to do some cleaning and sorting the crud on some of the storage shelves along the sides of the garage to allow for easier jacking up of the car inside the garage, which would allow me to continue to work on the car in any weather.
But seeing as it was still nice weather on the day, I managed to get the work done outside - provably for the last time this year
I went for the same 356mm Yellow Sport Racing disks that came with my BBK originally to avoid any offset issues. These came without center bells as you're meant to reuse your originals. Given that the existing bell nuts and bolts were quite rusty, it was nice to see a brand new set included with the new disks! They even come pre-treated with locktite, which was nice.
The existing disks have developed a rather large lip, with slots being quite shallow by this point, plus the middle section of the disk braking surface starting to develop micro-fractures. I do not blame this issue on the disks - I tried some brake anti-squeal paste during the last pad replacement and this managed to get on to the pistons, which restricted their travel and resulted in the pads sticking a little, which caused mild overheating. VRT applied the paste, but given that it's not a common request I don't blame them for this mistake - I've fed that back to them and will be a bit more specific in the future.
BTW, the anti-squeal paste I used was quite effective with noise reduction, but you have to be careful with how much you apply.
It forms a rubbery layer between the pad and brake piston and reduces the amount of pad movement over the piston, thus the squeal goes away.
Anyway, with the old disks out, I went about setting the disks on to the brake bells, which was a bit tedious due to number of nuts and bolts and having to use the torque wrench to do each one. Oh and if anyone cares, the torque setting for these bolts is 19nm - I couldn't find this in the manual that came with the kit or online, so I had to ask Tegiwa for clarification on that.
As my Mintex M1155 pads were on the car for less than 2k miles, it felt like a massive waste of money to be replacing them with the disks, which is normally the recommended way. I used a hand sander to refresh and even the pad braking surface and put them back on with the new disks (Top pad is the refreshed one, if it's not obvious)...
I cleaned up the caliper pistons from any residue left over from the anti-squeal paste to allow them to move more freely, followed by all the brake hardware getting a thorough clean and copper grease to make sure that the pads could retract smoothly.
Overall it took a few hours to complete the job, but it was more because I took my time making sure that everything is cleaned, greased and working properly. I know that the calipers are looking rather filthy and one of my winter jobs will be to get them professionally painted as it's the one thing that is still nagging me about the car
Oh, she passed her MOT with flying colours, which was nice.