Just wanted to pass along my experience with brake fade in my TR6...
First off, there are two kinds of brake fade. There's PAD fade and there's
FLUID fade. When the pads have overheated, the bonding material in the
pads is vaporized and forms a sort of barrier between the pad and the
rotor. Result: no friction, no brakes. BUT... you still have a pedal.
The pedal remains firm. Fluid fade is the result of boiling fluid, and
results in the pedal away entirely. Still no friction, but in this case
it's because there's no pressure squeezing the pads against the rotor
anymore, and therefore no brakes.
I've cooked the brakes on my TR6 twice. Neither incident resulted in an
accident of any kind. (mostly just blind luck, to be honest!) But both
instances were pad fade, not fluid fade. In both cases I was driving at
about nine-tenths on roads in the foothills near Medford, Oregon.
A while back I asked the list about the possibility of machining "wiping"
grooves into the rotors to help evacuate the hot gasses from under the
pads. You see grooves like this on motorcycles quite often. Now I see
that Moss offers cross-drilled rotors for TR6 also... that's quite
interesting, too.
One more note about drving and brakes: I agree with Egil Kvaleberg that
brakes should not be used to hold speeds on grades. It is also my
understanding that downshifting to stop for stop signs and traffic signals
is NOT the proper technique... that this subjects the clutch to needless
wear and after all, the brakes are easier to change than the clutch.
Incidentally, from Paul Frere's book entitled "Sports Car and Competition
Driving" here is an interesting quote:
"It can confidently be said that the merit of a driver is inversely
proportional to the number of times he applies his brakes unnecessarily for
a given mileage."
Pete Chadwell
1973 TR6
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