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So paying someone to do brakes on all 4 corners just costs $1k these days.

Priest said:
Yeah, my track buddies that have german cars always buy their lifetime warranty brake parts from FCP Euro "They aren't the best pads and rotors, but I'll warranty a set ever year".
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And all the people who get steered to FCP Euro by all the idiots that think expensive means good wind up paying for it.
 
Leadfoot21 said:
Sounds like you need a better service writer , they should take care of you .

Arse, go eat a snickers . Brakes ARE the biggest safety item and are extremely important . What you said is ignorant and I’m certainly not a Reddit person . You spend too much time online .

To the second part you ran with that one out there in left field . The technicians as clearly outlined in this thread aren’t getting rich off this work , but being a mechanic is job security or being in the automotive industry in general . The average Joe doesn’t know how to tie their shoes anymore . I’ve never made too much money but I know I will always have a paycheck .
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Few (even professional technicians) understand how to properly service brakes.

While I agree that it is very important safety system, the industry seems to have the new guy or the lube tech do the brake jobs...because they're "easy".

Brakes are one of the leading retail segments in auto parts and probably the leading DIY repair. After having specialized in brake system parts, design, and diag for the last 20 years, I'm fairly comfortable making that statement that 50% or more of the vehicles driving around out there have brakes that are not operating as they should be.

One example is Arse and his typical ignorance...

How many professionals get out a dial indicator when the rotor goes on the hub? How many professionals perform a bleed after pressing the pistons back into the calipers? How many professionals change brake hoses before they're leaking? How many professionals slap a bit of wheel bearing grease on the slide pins? How many professionals slather everything in anti-seize? How many professionals torque wheels? How many professionals use the cheapest parts they can find? How many professionals, despite never having attended any comprehensive training on brake systems, feel they know everything there is to know? How many professionals look up the procedure in SI before performing a brake job? How many professionals replace one time use fasteners when performing a brake job?

Very few.

....and the reason is, that while whatever hackfuckery they just did with whatever junk parts they decided to use certainly made the brakes perform better than they did when the neglected pile rolled in the door in the first place, I can almost guarantee that they are leaving a lot on the table as far as brake performance and longevity goes. I've had plenty of fresh brake jobs come my way that I made perform better.
 
ScottRS said:
Regen braking in everything EV/hybrid I've seen, works by using the drive motor(s) as a generator to pump electrons back into the battery, doesn't involve the wheel brakes at all.
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Thanks. Makes sense explained that way. :beer:
 
Lbhsbz said:
Few (even professional technicians) understand how to properly service brakes.
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I'll have you know that every time I do brakes on my garbage I mic the rotor and flap wheel it until it's sub thou variation everywhere. I'm not gonna claim it's right nor that it's flat, but it's definitely uniform thickness. :flipoff2::laughing:
 
didnt read the entire thread, guess Im not that interested in brake service prices around the country. but Im interested enough to add what we do for reference. (?:homer:)

We have a brake lathe, will turn rotors if there is enough material to meet specs. Prolink lists minimum thickness for all rotors. We do 1.5x on parts and $75/hour for labor. $10 to turn a rotor.
 
Dead Pool said:
Most people have no tools, no mechanical sense, and no desire to get sweaty or dirty. So the shops can charge whatever they want. I did all 4 brakes, pads, rotors turned ($10/each at oreilleys near me), calipers, axle shafts, shocks, and struts on my wife's Honda Odyssey last year. Rock auto parts was something like $550 all together. The cheapest mechanic shop wanted $2500 to do the job. Took me all weekend working off and on in my driveway to save two grand.

Most people on this forum would do the work to save $2000. Most of America can't or won't. Same reason my 9 year old has the entire neighborhood on a plan for him to clean out their trash cans. $10 a can, he does 40 houses every other month, some have multiple cans. People are lazy, worthless fucks with more money than sense. The end.
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That is awesome :smokin:
 
Dead Pool said:
Took me all weekend working off and on in my driveway to save two grand.
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the problem with the thinking and the entire bitchfest going on in here is you dont assign a value to your time when talking when talking about the cost. while you saved the money, you traded away an entire weekend.

if you are not paying someone at min $100/hr for a semi skilled task, they are cutting corners somewhere running their business. be it on the administrative side and/or not paying their people market wage meaning they get the bottom of the barrel.

in short, value cost money just like you want to be paid the maximum amount for what you bring to the table at work.
 
Splib said:
Anyone do regen brake system pads on a Hybrid ?
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My Chevy volt has 100k on it with factory pads, still above 50% ish too, regen takes out all that brake wear.

Shop labor by me is $200-$250 / hour, so brake jobs are stupid expensive.
I've been out of the game for a while, but I would turn OEM rotors, to about 50% of the min spec, after that, replacement.
When I would get new parts store brand rotors, I would still turn those to avoid comebacks. Once you get a get brand new rotors that is out of spec, you just start taking precautions.
 
mobil1syn said:
the problem with the thinking and the entire bitchfest going on in here is you dont assign a value to your time when talking when talking about the cost. while you saved the money, you traded away an entire weekend.

if you are not paying someone at min $100/hr for a semi skilled task, they are cutting corners somewhere running their business. be it on the administrative side and/or not paying their people market wage meaning they get the bottom of the barrel.

in short, value cost money just like you want to be paid the maximum amount for what you bring to the table at work.
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I will say that value ranges wildly by location.

I can drive 40 miles one way and 200+/hr is the norm. 40 miles the other way and 75/hr is reasonable.
 
TRINDU said:
I will say that value ranges wildly by location.

I can drive 40 miles one way and 200+/hr is the norm. 40 miles the other way and 75/hr is reasonable.
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generally speaking the local tax bracket will correlate with the labor cost for skilled labor, aka supply and demand. locally people trade 4hrs of their day to drive 35 miles one way to make an extra $15k a year. i would rather make less and have my life, some people only look at the number on their w2.
 
The thing is that for that $1,000 the dealer and even some independents are charging, I'm getting the new tech because "brake jobs are easy." The next thing I know a pad is dragging because they didn't lube the floating pins. I change out the fluid when I'm doing brakes as a matter of standard practice. They charge more for that. I check bearings, e-brake cables, perform the bedding procedure, I actually clean my hubs before I mount the rotors and a hundred other things to get a quality job that the book assume a technician does to take 2 hours and they skip so they can get done in 45 minutes so they get to book more hours, the shop turns more cars and everyone makes more money except the guy who paid for $1,000 brake job really got more of a $600 brake job. because he's missing an hour and 15 minutes worth of work.
 
welndmn said:
My Chevy volt has 100k on it with factory pads, still above 50% ish too, regen takes out all that brake wear.

Shop labor by me is $200-$250 / hour, so brake jobs are stupid expensive.
I've been out of the game for a while, but I would turn OEM rotors, to about 50% of the min spec, after that, replacement.
When I would get new parts store brand rotors, I would still turn those to avoid comebacks. Once you get a get brand new rotors that is out of spec, you just start taking precautions.
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The trick is knowing how to verify that it's within or out of spec. Putting it on the hub or on the brake lathe is not the way.

The best rotor runout fixture is a piece of 5.5" or so (biggest that will fit in the hat) faced off roundstock sitting there on the workbench that you slide the rotor round on while the indicator is measuring runout....that way you're not stacking errors.
 
arse_sidewards said:
I'll have you know that every time I do brakes on my garbage I mic the rotor and flap wheel it until it's sub thou variation everywhere. I'm not gonna claim it's right nor that it's flat, but it's definitely uniform thickness. :flipoff2::laughing:
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We can only hope that some day you'll learn to just STFU....maybe rust away and die like your shitboxes
 
Lbhsbz said:
We can only hope that some day you'll learn to just STFU....maybe rust away and die like your shitboxes
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It's not my fault you're not entertained.:flipoff2:

I should clarify I only flap wheel shit the 50% of the time I don't do new rotors. :laughing:
 
Dead Pool said:
Most people have no tools, no mechanical sense, and no desire to get sweaty or dirty.
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Ever notice that the “put it together yourself “ type furniture includes a pretend screwdriver or wrench, cuz people don’t know how to do shit anymore. Crazy to think any house/apartment doesn’t even have a small toolkit.
 
Hooligan said:
Ever notice that the “put it together yourself “ type furniture includes a pretend screwdriver or wrench, cuz people don’t know how to do shit anymore. Crazy to think any house/apartment doesn’t even have a small toolkit.
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My neighbor across the street politely asks me to remove his garden hose from the spigot every fall because he can’t get it off by hand and doesn’t own even a cheap pair of HF pliers.
 
Lbhsbz said:
buy your neighbor across the street a cheap pair of HF pliers?
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Ehh I figure it’s the least I can do. You see, I smashed his daughters beater car backing out of my driveway half asleep and headed to work at 4 am a few years ago and he just shrugged it off. Even if not for that, if that one yearly act earns me a good relationship with my neighbor, it’s a very easy task.
 
Dead Pool said:
Ehh I figure it’s the least I can do. You see, I smashed his daughters beater car backing out of my driveway half asleep and headed to work at 4 am a few years ago and he just shrugged it off. Even if not for that, if that one yearly act earns me a good relationship with my neighbor, it’s a very easy task.
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Ahh...a decent neighbor. understood. If my neighbor was like Arse I'd braze that fucker on there for him
 
Lbhsbz said:
Centric Parts...up until about 2020 when they were purchased...ironically by the same company who owns Raybestos (and now Cardone) that supplies rotors to NAPA lol.

Pretty much every aftermarket rotor (regardless of who's label is on it) has come out of China for the last 20 years...and before that too. There are some very good ones coming out of china...best I've seen actually. There is also crap. It has to do with who's running the company that's buying them and their level of understanding of anything.

Here's a story...not brake related but another product line from a brake company with the same bunch of dipshit engineers at the helm...

We bought a company about 10 or so years ago, maybe more, that supplied rotors and drums to autozone/oreilly/pep-boys/etc....white boxes, only difference was the label. They also supplied a decent amount of the chain house brand chassis program (ball joints, tie rod ends, etc)...which I became involved with after I discovered it was shit. Now, this place was all ISO and whatever other certs made them look good. I discovered some problems with a few ball joints, and was sent test results from when they had an independent lab run some tests per an autozoo requirement the year prior. This was a ball joint that when installed, was loaded such a manner that the ball stud was always forced INTO the cup, NEVER OUT. The ball joint in use also had about 6 degrees of articulation possible from center. Each test of 250K cycles cost us somewhere in the neighborhood of $40K, and there about 2 tests per part number per supplier...call it 3 suppliers per part. We also tested OEM parts and competitor (MOOG) to see how we stacked up. These were SAE standard tests, which the test protocol calls out for the test engineer to take the design application into consideration to design the tests/fixturing/determine the loads.

All the cycle tests were performed unloaded
They did a "push out" test where they tried to force the ball stud through the forged housing
They did a "pull out" test where they pulled the ball stud out of the housing
They did a "cam out" test to see how much articulation they could get before it broke
I forget the last one.

Anyway, they couldn't push the fucking ball stud out because it was in a solid forged housing
The pull out test was fucking stupid and a waste of $40K x however many of that part number we tested because the joint would NEVER see loads in that direction
The cam out test went to 20° or so and was also stupid because it was not possible to move it more than 6° in use.
The cycle tests were stupid because they didn't load the parts to simulate the weight of the vehicle.

The ENTIRE fucking engineering dept at this place that we'd just bought could not understand why I was losing my shit over them having wasted about a million dollars accomplishing fuck all. All they could say was "those were the tests Autozoo wanted". Nobody ever thought to maybe educate the rest of the people involved that the tests were pointless, and just did them because they're too stupid to realize it themselves.

"Engineer" in a manufacturing environment often times means the person is sort of qualified to measure a part with a set of harbor freight calipers and make sure it matches a shitty basic dimensional print. Nobody knows why the prints are toleranced the way they are or cares, or knows enough to care. A few get it, but it's rare.

These are the kind of people that run modern companies in many cases, and that's why everything is shit. Not because of China.
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20 years ago, China made junk. Now China still makes junk, unless you spec something to be made better and pay for it and make sure they use the specified materials. They can make quality stuff, too. But they either can’t or won’t figure it out on their own.
 
DMG said:
Now China still makes junk, unless you spec something to be made better and pay for it and make sure they use the specified materials and frequently check quality yourself to be sure they're not pocketing the difference
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Fixed.
 
DMG said:
20 years ago, China made junk. Now China still makes junk, unless you spec something to be made better and pay for it and make sure they use the specified materials. They can make quality stuff, too. But they either can’t or won’t figure it out on their own.
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China will make whatever you ask them to make....from garbage to world class parts. All dependent on what the customer asks for and specs. If you go to China looking for a pricepoint, you'll get junk. If you go to China looking for service and quality, that's what you'll get, but it won't be cheap.
 
Lbhsbz I have a question for you. It applies to bedding in new pads when doing a brake job. I have a small auto repair shop (its just me here) and I do an average of 3-5 brake jobs a week normally. I take each car out after the brake job and bed them in the best i can as well as a safety check in a few miles of driving. I know they are not bedded 100% but it's better than what most shops do, if they do it at all. My question is, when you buy a new vehicle off of the lot I assume those brakes were never bedded in, correct? I also know places like pep boys, firestone etc don't do that either. When you get that pad material transfer to the rotor that when the brakes obviously work the best though. So what are your thoughts on this? I would love to be able to drive a customers car for 20-30 minutes to do the complete bedding in process with allowing them to cool down completely but that's just not feasible.
 
House and auto labor has gone up proportionally with the less and less people knowing how to do the job. $1500 to plumb a sink. $1000 for brakes. These are 2 hours jobs if you know how to do them. What bugs me though, are the people who suggest that these prices are justifiable and fair. Plumbers are the worst.
 
jpmassey said:
House and auto labor has gone up proportionally with the less and less people knowing how to do the job. $1500 to plumb a sink. $1000 for brakes. These are 2 hours jobs if you know how to do them. What bugs me though, are the people who suggest that these prices are justifiable and fair. Plumbers are the worst.
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What’s funny about this is that they are 2 hour jobs if you have mastered the trade and have thousands of dollars in tools. Otherwise you get shit like I just fixed where someone had their dad help them put brake pads on their rusty rotors and 3 of the 4 caliper bolts came out.


In my area both brakes and plumbing are substantially cheaper, btw.
 
Arps said:
How often are people doing rear brakes? Ive seen cars with over 100k on them and tons of meat on the rears.
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I had cars going through rear faster. Even though, I’d prefer brakes to wear faster. I nearly never able to get my vehicles’ brake pads to wear out evenly. I might can if I tear everything down to remove rust, debris and lube yearly on a 10k/year commuter.



Roc Doc said:
:laughing:

And the asbestos floor and ceiling tiles in my grade school. Safety for the children
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Don’t forget the lead paint on walls.
DMG said:
Btw, here in the rust belt you need to replace pads and rotors every 2-3 years becaue the slide pins will seize or the pads will stick in the brackets.
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I had best luck with avoiding that up here if I get coated rotors and power stop’s painted (powder coated?) calipers (blingy red lol) off RockAuto and periodically lube pins.

My friend did his girlfriend’s car (early 2000’s Chevy Malibu) and sent me this pic. :laughing:

1710522775395.jpeg
 
jpmassey said:
House and auto labor has gone up proportionally with the less and less people knowing how to do the job. $1500 to plumb a sink. $1000 for brakes. These are 2 hours jobs if you know how to do them. What bugs me though, are the people who suggest that these prices are justifiable and fair. Plumbers are the worst.
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"hurr durr supply and demand"


There, look. I saved a whole bunch of people who outsource their morals to the market (which is arguably no less worse than outsourcing them to the law or government) a whole bunch of angry keyboard pounding. :flipoff2:
 
89yjon said:
Lbhsbz I have a question for you. It applies to bedding in new pads when doing a brake job. I have a small auto repair shop (its just me here) and I do an average of 3-5 brake jobs a week normally. I take each car out after the brake job and bed them in the best i can as well as a safety check in a few miles of driving. I know they are not bedded 100% but it's better than what most shops do, if they do it at all. My question is, when you buy a new vehicle off of the lot I assume those brakes were never bedded in, correct? I also know places like pep boys, firestone etc don't do that either. When you get that pad material transfer to the rotor that when the brakes obviously work the best though. So what are your thoughts on this? I would love to be able to drive a customers car for 20-30 minutes to do the complete bedding in process with allowing them to cool down completely but that's just not feasible.
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I think new cars are road tested at the factory. But in my opinion, modern vehicles have so much braking power that losing 20% to all new brake parts for a bit, is not going to be a big deal.
 
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