Restless Native

Over the last 2 weeks a grinding noise from my brakes has become worse, so after plucking up the courage and finding some excellent advice on here I took the front pads off to have a look at them (assumed the front pads would wear faster that the rears).

Unfortunately I have no idea what worn pads look like and was hoping someone could give me some pointers. I have a jan 05 car on a 54 plate which has done 14,000.

Does this car's factory fit pads have wear indicating pins ? cause there was no sign of anything like that. The pads were shiny and a bit crumbled at the corners and one of them had an ovalish area about 2cm x 1 cm of pitting in the middle but there was nothing that would cause the grinding noise.

All help would be gratefully received.

Shaggydootoo

It sounds like your pads are battered, glazing (Shiny bit) is a sign of over heating and together with the edges crumbling shows they've seen some serious temp, i'd upgrade to a better fast road pad, which one depends how you drive, I use Mintex Xtreme there decent and about half the price of DS2500 which i've had (just made loads of noise), unless you wanna go track driving where the DS or Mintex M1155 would perform a lot better.

The choice is yours

Mother Theresa

Worn pads just have a very thin layer of the abrasive material on then and it is the attachment device (rivet or whatever) that causes the noise as it grinds against your disc. The edges of discs do crumble - a bit - more if they get too hot. Other signs of discs that are too hot are cracks wheicvh cris-cross the surface of the pad.
You can get stones between disc and dust shield which causes a grinding noise which is obviously unrelated to pad wear.