RE: Brake wear

["Brian Shorey" <bshorey@xxxxxxxxx>]

> 	I've always been under the impression that rear brakes wear faster
> than the forward one because of the stopping load that each one of them
> has to bear.  Forward brakes are in front of the car's center of gravity
> so they don't have as heavy a load as the rear brakes which have the
> majority of the car in front of them.  It's a matter of thinking about the

this is not my understanding.  during braking the weight of the car shifts
towards the front, so the fronts are doing more work.  that's usually why
the front disks and calipers are larger than the rear, because they're
called on to do more work.

pad wear, imho, has more to do with the relative amount of 'work' that any
given brake has to do (i.e., what percentage of the load of the vehicle is
the particular caliper/pad/rotor contributing towards slowing down), vs the
surface area of the pad against the rotor, vs the diameter of the rotor.

smaller pad area against a rotor for the same level of load will result in a
faster wearing pad.  larger diameter of a rotor will result in more of the
rotor passing by the pad for a single rotation.  there are more factors as
well - temperature, diameters of the master and slave (caliper) cylinders,
ventilation, ...

bs

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