At 08:02 AM 11/17/99 -0800, Scott Decker wrote:
>I would like to share
>a comment I heard a looong time ago regarding vehicle brakes. One of the
>guys that worked for my father said, "Why would you turn the drums or smooth
>the surface of those brake drums and disks? With all those deep scores and
>valleys, look at all the extra surface area you have for friction"... With
>that being said, sometimes it's all from a point of view...  BTW, he was
>kidding.

Brakes are turned when one installs new pads because the new pads do not
match the scores in the drum or disk. It *might,* in fact, be somewhat more
effective if the mating surfaces were matching but not "flat," but that
would be difficult to create by turning....

Back when I had plenty of kids and little money, and I did my own brakes, I
did not turn the drums; I just installed new brake pads. My theory was that
the drums would quickly wear the pads to match, and vice-versa, and the
brakes, in fact, did work as I would have expected. That is, there was a
minor loss of braking power when the pads were new, which quickly returned.
Never had a problem.

The reason a shop won't do this may have more to do with legal and
liability issues than with safety per se. If there is a slight loss of
braking power, and then there is an accident, the brake shop could be
blamed even if the loss of braking power was basically irrelevant to the
accident. How could the matter be proven one way or another? So if the
drums are turned, the shop is safe. Besides, they get paid for it.

Obviously, there may be other issues as well, not so easy to predict from
my desk....

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Abdulrahman Lomax
P.O. Box 690
El Verano, CA 95433