Last week did a 3hr XC ride at Swinley and my Hope Organic rear pads were totaly gone by the end. My front brake pad was about half worn.As many will know Swinley has a fair bit of sand and when mixed with water forms grinding paste..
This week I changed to "gold sinterered" and carefully bedded the pads in by making loads of stops in the car park before the ride, but to my horror after yesterday's ride, the rear pads are almost gone again. The front is still ok!.
My initial reaction is to think the rear disk may be rough or something but that seems not to be the case. The caliper is centred too as best I can. Wear is almost even on both sides. Maybe its just that the rear of the bike gets more spray as i normally lift the front over puddles? Maybe all those fine grooves in the new saw tooth disc help keep the fine Swinley sand mixed with water grinding the pads. The brakes are new tech Mono M4 and about a couple of months old. One thing i will say with Hope is that the metal the discs are made from is much tougher than my old Hayes brakes which used to wear the meatal disks quite fast. Other than this wet wear problem these brakes are superb with amazing modulation stopping power and excellent quality.
Perhaps you drag the rear brake?
I would love to know what it is. I have hardly been using the brakes there as it was running very slow in the wet and also isnt that hilly, maybe the callipers are filling with sand and dragging the whole time...i didnt notice it though..
. It hasnt happened on other bikes ridden there in the past either. Maybe its just sharp machining edges.
[i]carefully bedded the pads in by making loads of stops in the car park before the ride[/i]
TBH that's not bedding in. Bedding in is doing loads of stops from as fast as you can go, to a complete stop in as short a time as you can to get the brakes really really hot...Rear brakes always go first, they stay more cold, smaller disc on the back?
sintered is your only hope!
Organics for summer..erm...dry weather
Sintered for UK, except for the 'heatwaves', b ut then they work well enough then, so go sintered and look forward to two sets of pads per year, one for the dry winter, spring and summer, one for the wet bit in october, november and december.
sad thing is that these pads were sintered. The previous week the rear pads that wore out were organics...they had been well bedded in by dry riding in the surrey hills. I got these new sintered bedded in by riding for 10mins in the car park trying to get them hot.
I think the big factor must be rain. On the 2 rides I wore each set of pads out, it was absolutely pi**ing down for quite a bit of the ride so the pads never got hot. They also were not used much so material may have built up in them.