Rear brake fade?

kcvpr

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Hello everyone!

I recently installed the 27WON BBK on my Sport hatchback.

I went for a drive last night and had a few consecutive particularly hard braking turns on HWY1 and I started to smell burning brake. Pulled over and my rear brakes smelled really strongly of over heated brakes, the fronts just smelled hot. Brake pedal was still firm, and felt like I had plenty of brake power left.

That being said in my opinion I wasn’t doing any braking I would have considered would get the brakes hot enough to smell them from inside the car while moving.

A few weeks ago I went out to get some burgers with a few friends and we had some “fun” on the way there and when we got there my rear brakes smelled really bad too. This was before my BBK was installed. Again I was braking hard but wouldn’t expect them to smell so bad.

sorry for the wandering post so far...

Is it possible that I somehow glazed the pads, and they just can’t keep up with the BBK now? The rear rotors have also been blue for a couple weeks now even before the BBK
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Did you also upgrade your rear rotor discs and pads or are they still stock?
 

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if your rotors are blue you overheated them and your pads. They will not work well anymore and will fade and burn a lot faster. I do suggest you replace both as the iron in your rotors have changed in hardness and will not function properly anymore. Your pads are also most likely glazed as you mentionned. If you have access to someone with a brake disc grinder you could try to get them ground to take off the top layer and sand off your pads. This MAY bring them back a bit but I wouldn't hold my breath.
 


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kcvpr

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if your rotors are blue you overheated them and your pads. They will not work well anymore and will fade and burn a lot faster. I do suggest you replace both as the iron in your rotors have changed in hardness and will not function properly anymore. Your pads are also most likely glazed as you mentionned. If you have access to someone with a brake disc grinder you could try to get them ground to take off the top layer and sand off your pads. This MAY bring them back a bit but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Yeah, I installed some stoptech slotted rotors and hawk 5.0 pads. Then flushed the fluid out with some endless RF650
 

circuit.heart

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if your rotors are blue you overheated them and your pads.
By the time you blue a rotor like this, street pads would not exist anymore. Typical "blue rotor" comes from heated transfer layer of pad on the rotor itself, and is fine. You can watch it go away if you scrub the pads on the rotor on a cold night without heating them up.

VSA likes to click the rear brakes to keep the car from understeering. You didn't specify VSA off on your Hwy 1 run, so that is culprit #1 for hot rear brakes, no matter what front brake system you have.
 
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kcvpr

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By the time you blue a rotor like this, street pads would not exist anymore. Typical "blue rotor" comes from heated transfer layer of pad on the rotor itself, and is fine. You can watch it go away if you scrub the pads on the rotor on a cold night without heating them up.

VSA likes to click the rear brakes to keep the car from understeering. You didn't specify VSA off on your Hwy 1 run, so that is culprit #1 for hot rear brakes, no matter what front brake system you have.
I was kinda thinking the same thing, when I took off the stock pads the passenger side had some minor chunking, but not glazing, driver side was fine.

That makes sense. I had tons of front brake issues on the Focus ST I had because it had verry bad ventilation and used the brakes to simulate a LSD.

I haven’t really explored turning off VSA completely yet, as I’m still learning the car. Does the 10th gen hatchback chassis have problems with snap oversteer or lift oversteer?
 

circuit.heart

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I was kinda thinking the same thing, when I took off the stock pads the passenger side had some minor chunking, but not glazing, driver side was fine.

That makes sense. I had tons of front brake issues on the Focus ST I had because it had verry bad ventilation and used the brakes to simulate a LSD.

I haven’t really explored turning off VSA completely yet, as I’m still learning the car. Does the 10th gen hatchback chassis have problems with snap oversteer or lift oversteer?
If you've never turned VSA off, you've never actually driven the car to its limit. VSA intervenes at like 70% of what the stock car can naturally do. On my drive home to San Jose from buying my FK7 (in LA), I took 17-N and tried to play with the car a bit. You can slide the tail out at 85mph and the car's responses are very progressive and forgiving. That was hour 5 of me ever driving a 10th gen Civic. It's an intuitive chassis.

Even after suspension tuning, the long wheelbase doesn't let the car snap out much, you just point the front end where you want to continue going, and hit the gas, and the tail will come back in. You need to do some stupid stuff (front splitter w/o rear wing + stiff RSB) to unbalance the car to the point of it being unsafe.
 
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kcvpr

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If you've never turned VSA off, you've never actually driven the car to its limit. VSA intervenes at like 70% of what the stock car can naturally do. On my drive home to San Jose from buying my FK7 (in LA), I took 17-N and tried to play with the car a bit. You can slide the tail out at 85mph and the car's responses are very progressive and forgiving. That was hour 5 of me ever driving a 10th gen Civic. It's an intuitive chassis.

Even after suspension tuning, the long wheelbase doesn't let the car snap out much, you just point the front end where you want to continue going, and hit the gas, and the tail will come back in. You need to do some stupid stuff (front splitter w/o rear wing + stiff RSB) to unbalance the car to the point of it being unsafe.
I’ve done the pedal dance a few times before, but not on the back roads yet. I haven’t been comfortable with the grip level or brakes until recently to push it far enough. I’ll probably give it a shot this weekend on hwy 121/128 through Napa. Have a lot of experience on those roads.

Have you noticed that the car seems to have more power when you do the pedal dance?

I had a pretty big RSB on my Focus ST which made it very prone to oversteer lol
 


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The VSA just doesn't intervene anymore. you have as much power but the ECU isn't limiting it becasue of minor wheel spin. Same reason why our wheels hop so much, i found on my car anyways that even with a RMM, when the traction control kicks in it feels like it wheel hops...Does it even on snow. Good to know about some rotor blueing only being pad transfer though.
 

Benster

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Yeah, I installed some stoptech slotted rotors and hawk 5.0 pads. Then flushed the fluid out with some endless RF650
Stoptech rotors are very good quality you won't be disapointed. I just don't understand why companies can't make rear pads when they do front pads. Even for the SI(although aren't all Civic rear brakes the same size?), stoptech doesn't make rear pads, just rotors. I'd like to match the fronts and rears when the time comes but so far nothing that interests me other than EBC is doing it.
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