More advice needed....front brakes this time

Hmmm...seems I _am_ having fun at the moment.

Just got the ZX6R back from the intermediate service, and it looks like
the front calipers need rebuilding sometime fairly soon (before the
winter, certainly), along with replacing at least one of the disks.
Suddenly it is becoming a particularly expensive bit of maintenance,
especially at main dealer labour rates.

So never having needed to look at this kind of thing before, I throw
myself on the mercy of ukrm once more (ouch!):

1. How easy is a front caliper stripdown/rebuild on one of these things?
I am suitably mecahnically inept having messed about with old Landies in
the past, but I guess this is a bit more subtle than 1/2"AF spanner and
big hammer mechanics. Needless to say, the Haynes Book of Lies is now on
order....

2. Any recommendations on brake disks? OEM or after market? Change both
or just work out which one is causing the judder (but at 28k on the
clock doing just one seems like false economy)?

Or shall I just sell the sodding thing before anyone notices and get the
CBR900 I've always wanted (Sadly not a serious option at the moment
:-( )

Any thoughts gratefully received.

Chris

 

Thanks for the suggestion...You're not a Merkin, are you?

It's just that I would've thought the next sentence (which for the hard
of thinking was "Sadly not a serious option at the moment." ) was a bit
of a giveaway that the idea was irony.


And do post at the bottom, there's a good chap.

Chris

 

Buy The CBR900 specially if its wot u always wanted

 

If "these things" is bikes in general then not that hard as long as
you remember to keep things clinically clean. I personally can only
recall completely stripping down one set of calipers: IME they usually
just need cleaning unless the pistons are corroded.

A full rebuild with new seals etc. will cost mucho dinero.

Umm, I've found that Pro-lites work fine with HH pads but if the bike
is put away wet and not used for a few days then the pads stick to the
disk surface and you get a nice pitted imprint of the pad on the disk.
The brakes then become juddery and don't improve much with use. I've
had to use emery cloth to clean up the ones on the FZR more than once.

Oddly the cast-iron disks on the Quota, which go yellow at the first
hint of rain and stick solid if left wet overnight, recover remarkably
quickly.

I've just ordered an ABE replacement for a warped disk on the TLR.
Won't be able to report on it for a week or two, though.

If your disks are near the wear limit anyway and you're keeping the
bike then replace both disks. Oh, and you're supposed to replace the
pads too.

 

Marvellous. I'll put away the lump hammer then.....

OK, time to flaunt my advanced ignorance of motorcycle mechanics.

Why do you need to use EBC pads on EBC disks, and Kwak pads on Kwak
disks? A brake pad is a brake pad is a lump of very hard stopping
stuff, surely?


Chris

 

Simian says...

Couldn't have put it better myself.