Having not bought any pads for ages just wondered what most people were using now. Just looked at the price for Shimano replacements and at £29.99 a pair and rather sell me bike !!! Anything just as good but cheaper

you can get them for a lot less than that… (well, nearer to £20 than £30)

Superstar here 🙂

Checked on CRC and they are £29 squid?? I’ll take a look elsewhere as well then

I just stuck some Fibrax sintered pads into mine – loads more ‘bite’ on first contact than the originals but not grabby… hard to describe but feels better to me!

Too early to really comment but after managing to drip suspension oil on my stock LX pads (which I think share the pad design as the XTs) I’m trying out some A2Z pads from the Woolyhat Shop. I’ve heard good things about them and they do a wide range of pads and prices (with an aluminium backed option) that are far cheaper than the Shimano pads whilst costing (reassuringly?) a little more than the ultra-cheap ones of which there seem to be a for about.

I tend to buy off ebay, either the woolly hat shop or similar with good reputation or sometimes private sellers who’ve bought the wrong pads etc. I recently bought 6 lots of Shimano M06 sintered pads for XT which had the springs missing. It worked out at £6 a set and I keep a few spare springs in my tool box. So they should keep me going for a while. I always buy sintered and aim for under £10 a set.

It certainly has paid off keeping an eye on ebay, just have a regular search on ‘XT (or XTR) pads’.

well i thought i got a set the other week from cycle surgery for £20, but their site looks like they’re more than that as well. maybe they’ve gone up since or, more likely, i remembered wrong.

Underthesun

I’m going to take a guess, but I believe the only difference between the M975 at £29.99 on CRC and all the others for the older XT at way less, might be the spring is a larger size (the new XT servo brakes have more pad clearance in the caliper), and there appears to be a retaining cotterpin included aswell. A solution for you might be to keep the spring and cotterpin from your old warn pads, buy the cheaper old XT/XTR pads that are way cheaper, throw away the spring from the new pads (check first to see if they are actually different sizes!) reuse your old spring and cotterpin. If there actually isn’t any difference between the spring size of M975 and the older ones then it’s all a big Shimano con (which it obviously is anyway), you can buy cotterpins at B&Q for 10 a penny.

Might be worth consulting your LBS aswell.

i use fibrax in my slx brakes, and they feel better than the OE shimano ones

I stuck a set of Fibrax in around this time last year, numerous weekends around the 7 Stanes routes in Scotland, 4 days running at the Mega plus weekly rides around Swinley and they are still not worn, stopping power has remained the same. I am beginning to think that Fibrax have stumbled across an everlasting break pad.

B.A.Nana – Shimano pads listed as M975 are titanium backed and hence the higher cost.

Shimano claim the M975 pads are 50% harder wearing than the M965’s, something that appears to be true in my experience.

A2Z pads from Woolly Hat Shop. Nicer than Shimano pads IMO and only £9!