Buying a quality brake pad is like buying medicine. When you are buying a legal drug, you are not just paying the cost to manufacture, package and market the pill. The bulk of what you are paying for is research and development. The same is true for brake pads.
Aftermarket brake pads require a great deal of testing and engineering because they are made for a specific vehicle. A quality brake pad manu- facturer will spend a lot of time and money developing a brake pad application for your vehicle. This includes simulated and on-the-vehicle testing. These types of testing are time and equipment intensive.
As a technician, it can be difficult to judge a brake pad before you put it on the vehicle. But, doing your homework and looking for certain visual cues can help you make the right choice.
CATALOGS
When you first start looking for a brake pad application, chances are you will start in the pages of a catalog or in front of a computer screen.
Before you start looking at price, look at what the pad manufacturer is calling the pad or formulation. Many manufacturers will have multiple pad types for one application. Some of the distinctions in the lines may be guided by price, but many manufacturers use material types as product specifiers.
CERAMIC
Ceramic material’s structural properties are very stable under high temperatures, much like Corning cookware. But this is where the comparison ends. Ceramic materials that go into a brake pad are very small strands that are engineered to be a certain length and width.
There are three advantages of ceramic pads in certain applications. First, since the ceramic materials offer stable performance under a wide range of temperatures, they can offer quiet performance. Second, ceramic brake pads manage heat in the caliper better on some vehicles than some non-ceramic applications.
Third, ceramic brake dust does not show up on or stick to wheels like some other brake pad formulations. This could be an important factor if you have an expensive set of custom wheels.
NAO
Soft nonasbestos organic (NAO) friction materials typically wear more than harder semi-metallic compounds. It’s hard to generalize about the wear characteristics of NAO and ceramic-based compounds because there are so many. Wear varies depending on the formula the friction supplier chooses for a particular application. Different vehicles require different coefficients of friction, so formulas are often “application engineered” to deliver the best combination of stopping power, wear resistance, pedal feel and noise control. Most premium-quality NAO and ceramic-based linings will provide long life and wear less than an equivalent set of NAO pads on the same application.
KEVLAR
If you were to hold Kevlar fibers in your hand, they would look like cotton candy. But this innocent looking material is stronger than steel and can stop a bullet, or keep your brake pads together under high temperature and pressure.
Like ceramic materials, it is used as a fiber in brake pads to give them structure. It is a very expensive ma- terial, but it can help extend the life of the brake pad.
SEMI-METALLIC
Semi-Metallic pads use metal fibers to give structure and provide friction. The metals used are typically high quality steel, copper and other exotic metals.
So what is the other part of the semi-metallic mix? It is a variety of materials like glues, lubricants and structural fibers. The manufacturer will blend the components together to give the best performance for that application.