Brakes - 101

Originally Posted by wstar

Generally speaking, if you're paying attention to your car it will tell you when you have impending braking issues. Vibration while braking, squeaks from wear indicators on the pads, etc. 36K of regular street miles is nothing for the stock rotors and other hardware, pads vary a lot though, and I'm not sure how far those stock pads will go. If you're concerned, pull the wheels off and look at the pad thickness, you can see it without even removing them.

The most important thing for brake life is how you treat the system. The basics is never ride the brakes, and don't get in the habit of braking gently over long periods (which is basically the same thing). Use them for a quick shutdown of speed, as hard as you reasonably can without scaring the person behind you or in the passenger seat, and get back off of them to let them cool with the wheels rolling.

Don't ever stand on the brakes at a dead stop, that's the worst possible thing. You build up all that heat coming to a stop and then sit there and burn the hot pads into one spot on the hot rotors, which leads to uneven buildup of transfered material, and vibration, which will in turn cause problems in the rotor over time through a complex chain of events (basically, uneven buildup -> pad bounce/vibration -> uneven heating -> the hot spots become hard spots in the metal due to metallurgical changes under heat -> the hard spots wear slower than the soft spots, leading to an uneven metal surface even if you managed to scrape off the uneven pad deposits that started the whole mess).

That one thing is the cause of most brake issues and maintenance costs in most street cars, because virtually everyone drives an automatic, and at every stoplight they use the brakes slow and long (heat) and then stand on them in Drive at the stoplight until traffic moves again. Get to a near-stop on the brakes, get off the brakes, put the auto in Neutral, and coast down to natural stop without the brakes for the final few feet. It doesn't take much practice to figure out how to do it reliably, although stops on uphills kinda leave you mostly screwed. Try to plan those out - cut speed earlier and try to slow-roll it in gear until traffic moves again. Obviously the whole thing is more natural for a manual driver, since you never hold 1st-vs-brakes at a stop anyways, that would be silly. Just remember not to stop on the brakes, roll out the last few feet without them.

Originally Posted by joshs09slvrZ

Can you replace pads only and not the rotors or is that not a good idea?