I was wondering if people usually change Front and Rear Pads at the same time. i'm sure the pad wear will be different from a FWD car (wouldn't it?) As with the tires, do the brakes need to be "worn out" in a certain way? Please excuse my noobiness. Thanks in advance, Jchon
Front pads usually go way before the rears. Most disc brakes come with a wear indicator on the pads and you'll hear a squealing noise (when you apply the brake).
usually the fronts will go out first. but just depends i guess, just look at the amount of wear on the pads. Like patrick said, you will definitely hear them squeal when they are worn out and needing replacement.
you do not. If you're not already running ATE superblue fluid, you should change that out as well, though
Just to add confusion, it doesn't always work that way and I can't explain why. Probably driving style. My rears were slightly worse than my fronts, and the rotors were toast all the way around. This actually threw me off, as I was checking the fronts to determine pad life, while the rears were about a week from metal to metal. You have to check or have someone check all your brakes to get an answer. Don't trust ALL traditional opinions. Oh and like he said, ATE fluid and nothing else
When did the brakes on the STi the fronts were worn more than the rears. I just did the brakes on the 92x and the fronts on rears where pretty equally worn. In both cases I did the fronts and rears at the same time.
IMO, I wouldn't really waste the money on the hawk rears. With as little as the rears actually get used, I'd go with autozone specials. $30 for the rear, max.
For almost all cases that's very true (what Matt said). Even when I'd be too hard on the fronts, the rears would still bite some. Which is frightening. However, I'm convinced you'll cook autozone rears quick on a track over stock, at least on a sti, not sure how the quality of pad is compared to wrx. If you don't plan on tracking or auto-x or mountains, go autozone all around..
I ran XP10's in the rear always, just changed out the fronts to XP12's or Hawks depending on where I was driving to. My rears wore so slowly, i didn't even bother changing them