Brake and rotor change

lolita2008 said:

Often the cause of the pulsation is heating up the brakes (800 degrees!) going down a long, steep grade while riding the brakes and then coming to a complete stop with continual application of the brakes. There is a thorough discussion of this topic on StopTech's website. We saw it alot at driver training weekends with NASA. You can see an imprint of the brake pad on the rotor! Further, it only takes an elevation of 1/10,000 of an inch of material on the rotor to feel the pulsation, and this elevated area becomes more intensely hot than the rest of the rotor when brakes are applied in the future causing the problem to worsen over time. I don't think non race spec pads need to be bedded in, and to bed in race pads properly one has to thoroughly and repeatedly violate posted speed limits.

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Great post to which I agree also.
Welcome to the forum.

On my Mercedes E55 and Volvo 850 Turbo (no longer with me) I have tried OEM and performance pads and come to the conclusion that OEM compound provides a lighter pedal to stop (most of the time).

In a related story, I changed from an OEM compound pad by Jurid to one that is supposed to be OEM also (a different but well known and OEM supplier, Pagid). I had a much heavier pedal effort afterwards. After reading the StopTech "Bedding" procedure, I thought that would do the trick, but for the life of me could not understand why 99% of all drivers never do this and get along just fine.

Well, an E55 has tremendous braking power, dual metallic discs, etc. It's hard to heat those brakes up legally. But I did it (not legally). The smell was unbelievable, and finally my brakes started to fade and got very hot. It was truly a chaotic scene. I could not imagine everyone having to do this each time they change their pads.

Anyway, long story short, the pads still sucked so I returned them and obtained a set of the Jurid OEM that were on the car before and the pedal effort returned to normal without any of that rigamarol.

Bottom line is the pad material makes all (or at least MOST) of the difference.

This was also true for my Volvo which went through heavy pedal, squealing, etc as I tried different types of pads and returned to OEM.