TylerDurden

Hello, is this the same for Brembo calipers? As I have judder on 3rd set of discs, and now wondering if its the pads.

Thanks

Ginge !

iTrader: (1)

mate EBC are actually owned by a HUGE braking company that make brakes for trains, planes, automobiles,motorcyles, bicycles, wind power turbines and even more , its not a small company at all its just marketed as a brand to keep simple but the are honestly HUGE and based in america as a company

the yellow stuff pads are also awesome for most vehicle applications which is why alot of cossie boys running AP's use them but dont shout about it for some reason

ive tested loads of pads and i promise you apart from sintered pads they are hard to be thats before you think of the cost

im prob a bit biased as i did get the full EBC training course which taught me alot about brakes and how to identify failure of pads and causes ect

i no longer use Mintex and changed to EBC in my clio 172 when i got it and when i decide on my calipers they will wear blue stuff pads too and i no longer supply tuners with the pads as a job

proper brake pads and nobody can beat them value for money

PS: the old EBC brake issue was they didnt work well when cold was the main issue so people was complaning about them who didnt understand performance brakes and the other end of the scale was people needed a better pad compound but the middle of the road people actually liked them just new drivers with saxo, fiestas ect didnt understand the concept of how they work and just called them crap as they couldnt brake pulling off there drive in winter

Ginge !

iTrader: (1)

mate that is rubbish, pads are tested and failed for not passing, they are NEVER failed for working to well as they wont to a max braking test, they fail because they are either not tested yet or wont pass the breaking/wear part or they just dont forecast to sell enough to justify paying for testing

the fact is these are illegal for road use,,,, all of the other EBC are roadlegal apart from these compound, all 1144's are road legal and some 1155's for M5's Imprezas ect are but smaller cars are not and this is not due to working too well, please ANYONE who comments get the facts rather than play the internet for fools ( this wasnt aimed direct at you ian just you gave the best example to quote im afraid)

ps: it was my job to sell these and i have been on training courses with performance friction, Autex, brake engineering and EBC so its not one company telling me this info

Blue by You

iTrader: (23)

Are you sure about that?
I have read a post on another forum where Andy is quoted as saying he is the owner of EBC.

Makes no odds to me at all, but both of these statements can't be right and it would appear that someone has their facts confused.

Godspeed Brakes

iTrader: (259)

The company in Bristol is http://www.efiltd.co.uk/company_profile/our_team.shtml , Andy Freeman of Freeman automotive owns both companies as I'm lead to believe.
Not heard of them being owned by an American company ??

The information I was given , and information you can see on various website states that the pads must perform within - + 15% of the OE pads to pass Reg 90 , the +15% meaning that they cannot work better.

Obviously I haven't been on the same EBC course as you so perhaps I know nothing

Ginge !

iTrader: (1)

lord knows where i got the states part from but i remember the course was VERY interesting and very technical and TOTALLY changed my mind about EBC products that i tested them on the first attempt and VERY impresed with them but ill accept i must be thinking of another company but always belived it to be EBC

on the training i learnt about different compounds, whats in them, what do, why brakes judder, squeel, fade, what fade is and what causes it, what brake boil is and what they do to remove heat from pads ect and EVERY question asked the bloke had a good answer for it and it was obvious he knew his job well, as said changed my opinion of them and i can be a ignorant ****** at the best of times if im honest

i was told EBC is part of a bigger braking company which they are he also mentioned about wind turbines exploding and told me to type " wind turbine explosion" in youtube and watch a video and explaned how its caused ect in detail

mintex 1144's are road legal and the impreza 1155's are too but the 1166's are not and are a bit crappy in the winter which is why im guessing they aint

EBC blues will take off like i said about them 2 years ago when i was told about there plans but they are NOT road legal or even marketed as such !

andythejock01wrx

I note on their website EBC say they have 14 staff in LA, which suggests they have branched out in the USA (good, every little helps our exports!). I wouldn't say that suggests they are US owned. It also says most of their products are made in Blighty and makes reference to Freeman Automotive. Now, both Freeman Automotive and EBC Brakes are on companies house which unsurprisingly suggests what Ian says is correct.

I can't comment on the other stuff because I haven't been on the course.

Steve_PPP

iTrader: (3)

Interesting to read. I've got a bugeye wrx with standard calipers front/rear, and uprated discs (Godspeed fronts, Braketech - Aztec's ones on rear). Recently did a evening open pit lane session at Brands Hatch on new Bluestuff NDXs that i got from Aztec too. They'd had a couple of hundred miles of normal road use before going on circuit.

Generally, they are much better than any other pad i've used before. They don't fade anywhere near as quickly. But i seemed to run into a similar problem - after a while they just seemed to change - the braking performance dropped off quickly, and i had to start pushing the pedal harder and harder. This was when i started to get the judder. I initially thought i'd warped the discs.

This happened a few times in the evening and each time i slowed and pitted. The heat was bad enough that both fronts AND rears had smoke pouring off when i was stationary, which lasted for a few minutes. Unfortunately, the heat has transferred into the wheels too as my plastic centre caps distorted (one of them is still somewhere around Brands!).

Positive - once cooled down, they worked brilliantly again - until they started to cook again. The judder was gone once cooled - which implies it wasn't a disc problem....

Other things i've observed:
- They seem to loose a lot of pad material when overheating. The grooves in my front disks were all nearly filled with pad material.
- There is a fair bit more discarded pad material around the edge of the main block, which seems to have turned white and looks like little crystals....

EmzWRX

iTrader: (2)

I was one of the peeps with WRX at Snetterton struggling with EBC blue stuff! Lap 1 was fine, end of lap 2 was a struggle, lap 3 scary, come in, let cool and it would continue, now I'm struggling with brakes, feels like the pads have killed my godspeed discs, the pads themselves are crumbling!!

Covered about 2000 miles!! I is not happy and will not be purchasing again!!

stockcar

Steve PPP and EmzWRX, what you both describe is symptomatic with the pads over-heating and going beyond their working temp. ability causing pad drop-out and hence the judder............


alyn

p.s. i've never done an EBC training course either so i obviously know nowt!! LOL

EmzWRX

iTrader: (2)

If they are intended for track use why the hell are they overheating so soon?

micaredwrx

iTrader: (3)

I witnessed the same on a track day at Snett recently (same as EMZ). Personally I use PF z pads (and have done for the last few years), But have been tempted by the blues and was going to swap out when the z's have worn out.
Not a chance!!! The amount of deposit they leave on the disc or in the wiper slots (on a DBA disc or similar) there's no way i'm gonna spend that sort of money for a pad that clearly isn't designed to cope with the sort of weight a lardy newage carries! Sure, they may work ok for a lightwieght car (say sub 1000KG) or for fast road use (whatever that means) they just don't cut the mustard imo!
I'll stick to PF from Alyn thank you very much

Steve_PPP

iTrader: (3)

Thanks Alyn, looks that way, doesn't it.

I'd be interested to see what Aztec say. Considering the fact that they're marketed as a fade-free, track/race pad (well, they must be if they're not road legal yet! ) surely they shouldn't give up so easily.


Thats pretty worrying in itself. I managed to do 15 or 20 minute runs before I hit problems, but then I'm aware of the brakes and I was being fairly gentle on them.

I'm going to take my NDXs off tomorrow to inspect their condition. I'm going out to Germany in 4 weeks for a Nurburgring trip and I want to make sure i've got no pad crumbling/breaking up before I go! I'll take some pictures whilst i'm at it, but i've done about 150 miles on the road since the trackday so i expect the white crystals and groove-debris will have gone by now.

EmzWRX

iTrader: (2)

Yep same as Godspeed stated!!

I'm now looking into K-sports now so pads will have to stay on for now, lucky I don't use everyday x

Andy Freeman

Hi Guys

This is Andy again

1) We have never provided training courses in my Company so please state where and when this took place
2) We HAVE accepted customers to visit us but not people who have been doing the rounds at other brake factories and we wouldnt accept people that had
3) There are many reasons why (forgive me for swtating this simply) you cannot throw a set of race pads on a standard street car and make it race worthy. Standard calipers DRAG LIKE HELL and push pads way over the top on temps and cause fade,judder and edge crumbling.

I am working today on an update bulletin on all these recent issues which I hope will be helpful and am working closely with some users to test my theories.

For now I would say

1) COLOUR STRIPING on some EBC pads is not an issue, just ignore it
2) MAKE SURE STOCK CALIPERS ARE REBUILT TWICE A YEAR or they will drag
3) SCRUB DISCS WHERE PREVIOUSLY USING CARBON BASED PADS such as PFC or Pagid as these leave a glaze layer on the rotors and nothing will work on them till this is GONE.
4) 90% OF THE TIME vibration is due to disc mislignment and the car should be sent to a Pro Cut center and £40 spent perfect the alignment...EVEN IF THE DISCS ARE BRAND NEW OUT OF THE BOX....YES EVEN THEN
5) Of Course K Sport or Hi Spec or any good performancer caliper will be a massive improvement over stock. Less drag, better release, cooler running etc etc


More shortly guys

My comments are made on a take it or leave it basis, if some of you know better then bully for you . I take my 35 Years experience as a brake designer and offer IMHO advice, if you ignore it or dont like it I am not going to be offended guys

Cheers

Ginge !

iTrader: (1)

Are the bluestuff still organic btw ?

overheating of brakes can be caused by what would could also be considered as abuse, race drivers have to balance the way they treat to car to help reduce failure and standing on the pedal last min as poss then hard is not the fastest way round the track due to heat in the brakes aswell as the standard OEM calipers are usually not great/out of alignment ect, my 4 pots sqweel and howl in reverse soon as i touch the brake which is down to alignment of the caliper

the only way to avoid fade totally is sintered pads which im sure the man will agree but you will trade off the pedal feel and will feel more like a on/off switch and solid on the pedal which some people prefer but some others dont like the having to hit the pedal hard and jerk about in slow traffic

either way i promise these are more around close to DS3000 or M1166's in quality and alot less money, the yellows work wonders in my clio and it gets driven like a go cart round country lanes that ive killed 3rd gear syncro in 3 months ownership driving like a child

the knowlege of the company in the aspects/theorys of braking was better than the other courses and i enjoyed the course alot

TylerDurden

How can you tell if the caliper is out of alignmnet?

Thanks

Ginge !

iTrader: (1)

if the rear of a brake pad touches before the front it creates a vibration in the air i belive or something and makes a squeek, do it the otherway as in front before rear and it reduces the squeek which is what happens on mountain bikes to stop squeeky brakes that and you can measure the difference on mine and its different on all 4 corners and in the middle too which im guessing is the downside on cast brakes just bolted direct to the up rights, ive never been bothered so as when im reversing its a nice little warning to people behind, if infront would be totally different and would prob get the calipers machined true on the lugs if it bothered me

Midlife......

iTrader: (2)

Ginge!

Andy Freeman says EBC do not run courses (post 75 question 1), I think he'd like to know which EBC place you went to ............

Shaun

Andy Freeman

Agreed

Ginge WHAT COURSE DID YOU ATTEND AT EBC

We are all waiting to hear

Thanks Andy

dynamix

iTrader: (3)

Are you seriously suggesting that anyone with std calipers should have these rebuilt twice a year then jeeesh !!!

Obviously I know nothing about brakes compared to you Andy... but I do know that (almost) NO-ONE with std calipers will be rebuilding them twice a year just so that they can run blue stuff when there are pads out there that can handle heat and stop/slow the car in all conditions and dont crumble away than these.

As for 90% of these being disc runout issues, why would these symptoms not appear on other pads on the same discs?

Blue by You

iTrader: (23)

I'm sure Andy's comments are based on long experience and are genuinely intended to assist in getting the best from your brakes.

However I can only think that prospective customers reading this will think 'Bu99er that for a lark' and buy their brake materials elsewhere where such onerous requirements as twice yearly calliper rebuilds are not a pre-requisite to reliable and safe brake usage.

ScoobyDoo69

iTrader: (17)

Interestingly enough, I had really bad brake judder after a hard session with the Bluestuff and thought I had warped my discs! But this obviously wasn't the case at all. I am finding them to overheat far too easily lately, which really takes the fun out of blasting around in the car

Andy Freeman

MORE TECH INFO ON EBC BLUESTUFF AND WHAT SET UPS WORK BEST ON THE TRACK


Yes maybe rebuilding calipers twice a year is a lot and I see you have piled in on me there again...... but let me just repeat we use the four piston early Impreza set up on our Dyno for pad testing at the Bristol factory and we change the caliper every month for a new rebuilt one as the hardened seals promote drag and cause heat build up and the results are scatty.

Coming back to the three guys (only ONE of whom I have had contact with ) who apparently had judder at Snetterton recently.

I would like to see some evidence that anyone at all has used this same car/caliper/disc set with another pad AFTER they had judder with our Blues and the pad swap eliminated the problem.

The answer lies in two phases.

First - the simple things every driver going to a trackday should have such as decent fluid (changed once a year minimum as hygroscopic fluids - which means all glycols- can absorb up to 13% water over a couple of years), free moving calipers, and you wont measure this cold so rebuild once a year at least, runout inspected rotors with less than 3-4 thou runout and not having used a carbon deposit pad prior without scrubbing (light abrasive paper works) the rotor clean. Then bedding the Bluestuff pads (or any pads) in for a couple of laps.

Second - we get into the real meaty stuff such as

a) are the rotors split casting designs or cheap "Molded out" units which have imbalanced geometry - 99% of Chinese rotors are molded out and no good at all in performance use, our website will have an article on this shortly

b) what is the rotor made of ???? We already have our Hi Copper DISCALLOY but EBC are launching their NEW HIGH CARBON ROTORS shortly. The main reason we havent done this yet is we simply dont have the SPACE to carry 500 blanks of every design in a SECOND grade of iron just for a few performance users. What we DO HAVE right now is the 294 and 325mm Impreza rotors is what we call DISCALLOY which is a high Copper grade and an excellent iron, cast and machined here in the UK. There is NO DISC IRON out there right now that can come close to this material and when we go to GG15HC iron in August, this will more or less be the standard that all performance drivers will ask for, believe me. GG15HC will reduce thermal judder (which is the problem here especially on Track day use and at revamped circuits like Snetterton which is now as hard as Donnington on brakes), reduce thermal cracking, improve conductivity and should solve the problem OR HELP A LOT AT LEAST.

c) If the use of that iron will not perfect this issue we will get Steve Payne our R and D Guru ro re-blend with a minor tweak Bluestuff with more thermal con and more sacrificial elements (making it a bit more dusty) but.......we will never give up the current Bluestuff blend, it simply has too many excellent reviews and customers all over the world. It has its place but maybe we need a new compound or two for special applications. Personally I am pretty sure for fast street and limited trackday there is still nothing out there that can get close to Bluestuff NDX and it will even be great in race use on better set ups which dont have caliper drag, poor cooling, overweight street fit-out and a standard rotor size made with cheap iron in molded out execution.

d) We are working as we speak on the next FULL RACE blend of pad which will offer ANOTHER alternative (Not replacement) to Bluestuff.

Please remember the basic difference between a race pad and a trackday pad. On the Track pads scrub speed off from 140 to 100 or 100 to 50 and then youre back on the gas. Trackday pads need to work well on the track but need to be able to bring a vehicle to REST FOR STREET SAFETY REASONS which race pads dont do and probably never would do. When we tested a US competitor blend of RACE pad recently, it faded like xxxx after the temp went up on our track simulation and created a firework display of metallic (steel fiber and carbon) sparks....you dont want that sort of pad on a fast street drive and it would NEVER pass R 90 which Bluestuff now has and is in the course of paperwork routine.

However as it is Bluestuff satisfies 97% of the people who use it. These first THREE ONLY issues of judder were NOT on EBC discs and were at SNETTERTON.We have sold literally THOUSANDS of sets of Bluestuff, in fact as of today we dont have a single set of Impreza Blues on the shelf and are rushing more thru the factory, thats how much this product is in demand.

People have also mentioned edge crumbling so let me address that.

Basically it doesnt matter too much. It has never been shown to cause loss of brake until it gets awfully bad. I have an office full of returned race pads from teams we support and there is almost always ( on all compounds both ours and other manufacturers ) 3-5 mm of edge loss around the upper and lower radii and the left and right edges. We are now putting a 5mm chamfer on the next batches of Bluestuff pads left and right flanks to eliminate that "VISUAL" issue but no organic pad with a sharp edge would stand up to 1000 C, it simply carbonises and crumbles away in those localised and exposed sharp edge areas. (Till now Bluestuff had NO edge chamfers although our Yellowstuff pads did as we approached Blue with a deep VEE groove instead of edge chamfers to reduce the circumferential arc)

I have had Race teams like in the UK who have returned pads after half a seasons use saying

" hey we had these pads in for weeks and they were still working great but when we took them out we noticed this edge crumbling, is that OK ????"

Someone else mentioned sintered, well let me tell you EBC owns the finest sintered metal producer on the planet in Ohio USA shown here and makes several MILLION sets a year of pads, being the largest OE supplier of sintered pads outside Japan.

www.americanfriction.net

but they are not the be all and end all of pads for automotive use. They do admittedly solve the edge crumbling as the sintered copper aloy is mechanically stronger. BUT..................

We need to get these GG15HC High Carbon discs to you guys.

Thats all for now

Enjoy the Royal Wedding if your watching



Cheers Andy Freeman

Andy Freeman

Whos discs and send me please an EDGE ON Photo and I can tell you if the blanks you are using are any good.

You are getting thermal judder or "Butterflying" which will be solved by the HIGH CARBON discs we are launching shortly

Its NOT the pads in my opinion, or at least not ONLY them

Cheers Andy

dynamix

iTrader: (3)

Andy - I am not piling in for the sake of it but there seems to be a mismatch of what these pads are sold as and what they are capable of in the average wrx or sti OE set up when used on track. As for rebuilding them twice a year I am sorry but you seem to be passing the buck... if they cant cope with the heat induced by a degree of caliper drag then it may be adviseable to promote them as a fast road pad rather than an endurance race pad. They seem to handle on road duties admirably

Once deposits have been laid on the discs by the blue stuff they are pretty much there for good, if they become bad enough then my understanding is that the localised heat changes the chemical make up of the disc itself forming I believe cementite (according to StopTech), which is much harder and even with skimming will not revert the disc material to its former glory. In essence they are bin fodder unless you spot this sign early enough and use some abrasive pads or paper to scour the surfaces of the deposits. So, using another pad on the same ruined disc will not be a productive experience IMHO. Many use other makes of pad without issues on the same disc/caliper set up without having to suffer judder or rebuilding calipers twice a year.

EmzWRX

iTrader: (2)

So we'd need to get discs done at pro-cut, new pads,and pay for another track day, then let you know how we get on lol!!

If I could I would!!

EmzWRX

iTrader: (2)

Ps Andy I haven't contacted yaself as I saw how far Cos (Paul) got and tbh I didn't see the point in a slagging match, I don't see point in spending nearly £500 to replace my discs, buy new pads and book another track day just to get a refund on the blues I brought, tha money will be put towards new calipers, bigger discs, and pf pads! But if you want anything from me I'm here feel free to contact me!!

ScoobyDoo69

iTrader: (17)

I believe they are actually EBC discs I will try and sort a picture for you. The judder went away.

ScoobyDoo69

iTrader: (17)

Right, they are EBC GD1056 discs.

Pics aren't great - these were taken after about 1000miles of the Bluestuff being fitted: