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My current XT rotors have been on my bike for ages; they continue to provide sterling service but I guess that at some point they'll need replacing; how do I tell when I've reached that point?
Supplementary to this, is it still possible to buy all steel 6 bolt XT rotors?
According to google min shimano rotor thickness is 1.5mm. If you have a micrometer or some calipers you can measure them. Deep grooves and adished wear surface would also be a worry but shimano are normally better than most others in not doing that.
Do you mean without the aluminium carrier or without the aluminium ice tech core?
If the former probably not these days, they used to but I don't think so any more and the normal aluminium spider ones are not that expensive for the quality.
If the latter then, as alluded to above, yes. There is ice tech with steel-aluminium-steel sandwich construction and all steel which I prefer due to cost and not liking the idea of such a thin sandwich construction for a brake disc when I am not a demanding user who is happy to replace often.
Cheers
I was looking for the old style single piece steel rotors rather than the type with the aluminium spiders; you can still get Deore and Zee ones.
This is when I found out.
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rotors need replacing??? 😕
Bloody hell , maybe I'll go back to Avids!
medoramas - Member
This is when I found out.
no, that's what happens when you use a disc with a ruddy big groove worn in the spokes from something not being set up right.
Medoramas, don't post that picture as if it wasn't your fault.
if you wear the braking surface unevenly, ie pitting. You can get the middles of the braking surface to wear more than the edges. ie worn more where there are more holes and thus less metal
I didn't notice in the UK other than a suspicion I was gtting through brake pads more often than usual. Didn't really look into it
Got on an alpine holiday to discover the bike wasn't braking all that well and really getting through brake pads. noticed the pads weren't wearing evenly, but loads of the edges of the pad, turns out the pads were wearing to the very worn rotors, which were massively more worn in the middles. By the end, the middle of the worst rotor was very thin
New rotors 40euro a pop and by the end of the week was making pads less than useable in half a day. wasn't going to keep popping 20euro a pair on pads so got by with the lesser worn rotor and lots of squealing and single brake braking. I went quite fast ...
Avid G3 rotors at 2 years old. Had lived a fair amount of their life on superstar sintereds, but mostly I think it was wearing one or two sets of pads down to the metal
[i]Medoramas, don't post that picture as if it wasn't your fault.[/i]
You can't deny that it needed replacing though!
I had the same problem, fixed it. This is what I learnt:
The pads MUST bite on the breaking track on the disc and not on the "legs". Mine were biting on the legs about 1 or 2 mm.I got through pads so quickly, cost me a lot of money. Also broke a few discs. The problem is that all discs are not the same. Shimano discs have a smaller braking track width than formula for example, so you can not use Shimano discs on formula brakes (which I was doing because I was told they are great). I spoke to Superstar as they have some very nicely priced discs and he confirmed that even on his discs the braking tracks are different (I noticed the braking track widths are now on the website). I ordered the biggest ones (wavey) and some sintered pads. Hey presto, no noise, pad wear like it never was and better braking.
Now I intend to change the discs every two years minimun. I also broke a disc like the picture above, thankfully it was the rear!
+1 measure...
about 2/3 the thickness of a new one - lighter though! 🙂
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Goldmine topic.
One of the symptoms of worn rotors i noticed was that it was increasingly hard to remove/re-insert my wheels...given the wear on the rotor/pads was greater in the centre of the braking surface than at the rotor edge, it meant the edge would get stuck in the narrower section as you tried to remove/re-insert the wheel. Took a while to realise it was worn rotors causing the issue
I feel ashamed that I've never worn through a rotor - like its a badge of XC riding honour. The last set of rotors I had were about 8 years old when I retired them, too. New rotors felt a bit nicer, that may have been placebo I suppose.
I've just replaced my front 203mm shimano rotor after 2 years of big hill summer riding.
As other have said, the middle of the brake track was significantly more worn, creating a concave breaking surface. Breaking performance on new pads was awful, and they wore increasingly quickly and overheated increasingly quickly. The overheating is what actually drew my attention to it first.
It's a testament to superstars red compound pads tbh. I'd not realised how hard they work and how well they were coping with the sun optimal conditions of a heavily with disc. Even with a new disc, I've managed to over heat pretty much every compound I've tried, bar reds and sintered.
Formula rotors - about 6 months in my experience.
Then they started wearing through pads unevenly, due to some genius who decided to design them with symmetric holes all the way round which wore out at an uneven rate to the rest of the disk 🙄
Reading this thread reminded me I needed a new set prior to Alps in 2 weeks, cost me £200 with the other "just in case " bits
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Only had this issue with a saw blade hope rotor which to be fair to Hope they replaced FOC as it had done very little work.... Since fitting the bigger V2 rotors and callipers I've managed to get 4 years out of the rear rotor with minimal wear and very even pad degradation. This with Uber race matrix pads I've just returned from a very hot gravity week in the Alps on the same set of pads , don't think I've ever managed that !