Bedding in Brakes on a New 111S
Bedding in Brakes on a New 111S
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X-Box

Original Poster:

233 posts

264 months

Wednesday 5th January 2005
quotequote all
Hi,

Any recs on how to treat the brakes over the first few hundres miles, in order to get them performing as best possible?

- Is it worth doing some hard braking (from speed) to drive the resin out of the pads etc......

>>> Edited by X-Box on Wednesday 5th January 19:21

onedsla

1,135 posts

286 months

Wednesday 5th January 2005
quotequote all
I followed this advice from Lotus' Nick Adams, posted by Bogie a while ago:

"With new pads and discs, or just new pads fitted run the car around for 10/20 miles using the brakes gently as normal to bed the two surfaces together. Once this has been done, check the surfaces of the discs and make sure here are no signs of any scoring or damage. Assuming all looks well take the car to an appropriate piece of quiet and straight, well sighted road and perform half a dozen medium pressure stops from 50 mph down to 20 mph to warm the brakes up. Avoid more than a minute between each stop so that the temperatures do not get a chance to deteriorate too much. Once the brakes are warm and the coast is clear, perform 2 or 3 hard stops from 70mph (where local laws allow!) to 20 mph, braking as hard as you can without locking up. Do not come to a halt between each stop, do them as fast as you can to get the brakes really hot. On the third stop come to a halt and keeping your foot on the brake press the brake pedal down as hard as you can and hold it there for at least a couple of minutes, don't apply the handbrake. This hurts if you are doing it right! This will bed the pistons, shims and pads together and will compress the pad material, giving a hard and repeatable pedal. Once the 2 minutes have passed, release the pedal and go for a short drive, using the brakes as normal to let everything return to normal temperatures. The brakes are now fully bedded in and ready for use in anger. Recompressing the pads once every few thousand miles to the above procedure will help keep the pedal firm, especially if you don't normally use the brakes hard."