Squeaky brakes

Wondering if anyone else is dealing with loud brakes and what you’ve done about it. I have the 4 piston Brembo setup on my car and running the included brake pads. During normal driving the brakes squeal pretty terribly with light to moderate braking pressure. Heavy braking and it’s silent but I don’t want to be slamming on the brakes as I come to each red light.

I’ve been recommended to try EBC yellow stuff pads - if anyone has gone to these, has that helped with the noise? I’ve already tried applying a liberal amount of the red disk-quiet goop but that hasn’t made any difference.
 
I feel your pain on the street... I run the Wilwood BP20 pads in the rear (4 piston Wilwood rear, 6 piston fronts). They feel great once heated up to temp on the track or mountain driving, low on dust, but their "unique metallic composite formulation" is high on squeal as you pull up to a stoplight. Searching for an alternate pad over the winter...
 
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I'm running Porterfield R4-S pads, of which Porterfield says: " The performance street pad, this pad offers the least dust and squeal of any of the street pads we carry. "

I'm pretty happy with them, but I'm running them in the older Wilwood 6-piston calipers the early cars had, so it's not a direct comparison with the new Camaro SS brakes on the current cars.
 
"I run the Wilwood BP20 pads in the rear (4 piston Wilwood rear, 6 piston fronts). They feel great once heated up to temp on the track or mountain driving, low on dust, "

I started with these same pads and although they didn't squeal on me, they had no cold bite at all. When hot they worked GREAT, but you can't be standing on the brakes at every stop to keep them hot. I switched to a no-dust, (supposedly) good cold brake pad that are unfortunately, not doing the job either. Simply not enough bite cold or hot.

By process of elimination I'll now have to look at pads that will dust and squeal to get the cold power I am looking for on the street.
 

Ian Anderson

Lifetime Supporter
Old trick for squealing brakes
Smear some copper grease on the back of the brake pad where the pistons contact.

Used to work wonders

Ian
 
Tried that already, and the anti squeal shims.too. The resonance seems to be generating from another area in the system and/or the pad/rotor combo is incompatible?
 

Randy V

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I do two things that generally work well.
1) I grind/sand A 1/4” wide bevel roughly 1/8” deep on the leading edge of the pads
2) I use a thin coating (maybe 1mm thick) of Red or Copper high temp RTV on the backing plate of each pad where the pistons contact the pad. Let skin up for an hour before installing the pads. The idea here is to put a micro thin compliant layer between the pads and the pistons. I did this on our race cars which were notorious for cold squealing. Also helped in regard to knock-back. I could not tell any difference in the firmness of the pedal nor reaction of the brakes.
 
Hey Randy,
To keep the dust down I use a rat tail file to bevel the leading edges but in this case there is no change in the squeal. Also gone the RTV route and no change. Like mentioned earlier the high-freq vibration is being generated from or projected elsewhere. Since the BP-20’s are the only pad I’ve used it makes sense to replace it with something similar and see if the squeal goes away. I have also resurfaced the rear rotors and no change in behavior.
 
For those with Brake Squeal & Vibrations.
I was recently reading an article dealing with these issues, can't find it again to copy and paste but the essence of the article was that the cause was a partial break down of the front wheel bearings, on examination, the individual bearing balls had worn down sufficiently to allow the bearing carrier case to rotate (metal to metal) and SQUEAL!
The vibrations felt identical to the discs being warped.
Worth looking at?
 

Randy V

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One other thought —
Ford used to have a big problem with brake moan, vibration & squeal. They implemented Anti-Moan brackets. These brackets were not much thicker than 10g steel and while the added a slight bit of unsprung weight, they were worthy additions to cars that did not have them or had been left off..
Not saying that this is the problem being experienced here, but I have made temporary anti-moan brackets from a strip of 1.5” x .125” thick hardware store steel. Put behind one caliper bolt and then clamped to another part of that suspension upright or axle tube.
Check out these pictures at the link below and give some thought...
http://www.mustangandfords.com/how-to/wheels-tires/24698-rear-disc-brakes-anti-moan-brackets/
 
Porsche's answer to this problem is to have small weights on each pad that counteract the noise made. Its the pads that create the noise as they vibrate against your disc. I have this problem also and it is down to the pad friction material - harder pads tend to make noise/squeel/vibrate.
 

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Paul’s photo shows the “roller skate” design. These pads originally had the roller skates added to the pads but were ground off due to clearance issues with the wheels. My reading has led me to believe this was an unsuccessful fix implemented by GM and the skates were later eliminated.
 
I've had good luck with the EBC Greenstuff pads - no squeal using both Brembo calipers and also Hispec calipers. Might be worth a try.

Good advice here - chamfer the leading edge of the pad...this puts the center of effort a bit farther to the rear of the piston center and can help. The RTV trick can also help. Another tactic is to used double sided high temp adhesive tape....yes, it's made and available and comes with the EBC Greenstuff pads.
 
I'm expecting to have the Brembo squeal and dust as well, it's supposedly normal. I had a similar issue with my Audi's Brembo calipers as well, it drove me nuts. After some research, lots of people have had great luck with Wearever Gold pads so that's what I went with on the Audi and now have zero squeal and very little brake dust so my ADV.1's stay looking clean finally! The most shocking part is it only cost $75 for a set of front and rear pads. I intend to swap the same into the SLC when it's time. They don't have the hard initial hard bite but I like that better, especially when pulling into the garage and slowly stopping.
 

Doug Dyar

Supporter
Common problem. Too racy a pad used for street duty. You don't generate enough heat in the brakes with street driving. Simple solution. Switch to a pad designed for street duty and your squeal will magically disappear.
 
Common problem. Too racy a pad used for street duty. You don't generate enough heat in the brakes with street driving. Simple solution. Switch to a pad designed for street duty and your squeal will magically disappear.

Doug - these are the oem pads used on Camaros. They were originally designed for a much heavier car so I don’t know if the SLC’s weight plays a factor here. Perhaps a Miata-specific street pad would be a solution, know of any that fit that bill?
 

Doug Dyar

Supporter
Doug - these are the oem pads used on Camaros. They were originally designed for a much heavier car so I don’t know if the SLC’s weight plays a factor here. Perhaps a Miata-specific street pad would be a solution, know of any that fit that bill?
Lightweight car with brakes designed for a heavy one. Definitely won't help your problem.
All the pad manufacturers have a range of pad compounds available. Contact the manufacturer of the brand you are using and select a pad further down the scale from race to street.
Have you bedded these properly? This, too can contribute to your problem.
 
Thanks for the suggestion Doug; the car came equipped with Ferodo HP1000 pads which are classified as "street/light track". I'm not married to Ferodo and I threw out the EBC suggestion as I've heard this addressed some noise issues for the Camaro folk.

I believe I've correctly bedded in the pads, I even have a youtube video of me doing some of the stops! :)

My original post was intended for SLC owners who have the Brembo brake setup (as supplied with the base kits). I'm sure I'm not the only one with squeaky brakes so I was wondering if anyone had decked this issue on their car, and what they did to do so.

This setup is known to be noisy on the Camaros as well; GM implemented dampers on the pads but later eliminated them (PaulW's post) - I believe because they found the dampers did little to address the noise issue.

That said, I did something a bit screw ball and it may have addressed the issue on my car. The stock pads have a rubber coated shim affixed to the back of each plate. A silver metallic plate is then used as a shim between it, and the pistons. My car came with only 1 set of these metallic plates and it doesn't seem like having them in place makes any difference. I acquired another set of the rubber coated shims and stuffed them in between the pistons and coated shims already affixed to the pads. Prior, I had scraped off any remaining bits of the "Disc quiet" goop that I'd tried earlier - so everything's free to move around more.

With the new setup I've logged ~200 miles of freeway/city and the brakes are only making noise occasionally, and at a reduced frequency and volume than before. I can easily live with today's current state.

So - for anyone running the Brembo setup on their cars, perhaps stuffing an additional shim on top of what's already there, and eliminating the goop to let things move around a bit more could help. It's likely the rubber coated shim is what did the trick as the factory supplied metal shim did nothing to quiet these brakes.
 
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