(Photos by Jay Spinella) – Admittedly, when I got these photos from Jay Spinella on Saturday, I had imbibed a few adult beverages, so you’ll understand when I was wondering what in the Hell he would send me photos of a weird saw blade. Then I figured out it was the remains of a 100% annihilated brake rotor and this got a lot more entertaining. This horrifically abused component came off of a Saab 9-5 and the driver complained of “noisy brakes”. Can you freaking imagine what this sounded like?! Hello?
Jay said that he and his brother Tom were thinking of ways to chuck this thing into a saw and cut plywood with it. I have seen rotors worn right through their faces and into the cooling ribs but we’ve never seen one worn all the way through the ribs and even through most of the backing!
If you want a clean example of why some people are not supposed to own cars, this is it. This Saab had to have been a disaster to drive under hard braking and there has clearly been a problem for a long…loooooong time. I wonder how many of the cars on the road today are rolling around on brakes that look like this. INSANE!
At night that car must have looked like a rolling “Star Spangled Banner”.
Well now…where is the noise coming from ?
Not to be a killjoy, but this rotor isn’t worn through the cooling ribs, since it has none. You can see it from the comparison shot with the other rotor. And since it has no ribs i’m guessing it’s the rear wheel rotor, so braking might not have been that bad if the front rotors were good, just noisy as heck. 😛 But front or rear, i’m guessing this job has cost a caliper too, cause up to this points there were probably no more pads to speak of, so the caliper was doing the friction, and possibly it was spilling oil everywhere when he braked cause the cylinders went way past the seal’s expansion capability 😛
Rear brakes rarely have cooling fins. They are solid and pretty thin to begin with.
Reminds me of my ex wife.. she drove my new truck, a 90 Ranger. I had an 86 Ranger for a beater. One day she asks me to check the 90, the brakes were sounding funny. No pads left, it was steel on steel, big gouges in the rotors.. When I asked how long it had been making a noise, she said ‘Oh, just a couple of days” .. she was not meant to own a car.
That’s definitely not the worst one. When I worked in a small, private shop a lady brought her car in and said that the braking problem had just started. When I took the wheels off, one of the front rotors had been cut all the way through it. The metal backing plate of the two pads were completely gone and the piston started to hit the rotor that was still at the very center of it!
Let me guess. They noticed the brake noise when the radio broke.
Its amazing how many people don’t give a thought to maintaining the part of the
car that stops it.
Back in the late 80’s I had broke my shoulder only to have my cousin ask me to help her husband, who had never held a tool in his life, fix their brakes on their Maserati. Since I had never worked on one I said “Hell yeah! I am in.” I showed up only to see that he had driven the car with my 2 month old nephew in the car to the point that nothing was left. The rotors were so bad that when I instructed him how to take them apart, they fell into two pieces. Needless to say I freaked. I told him to take it to a shop only to find out he had stolen the car from his boss. I love family. NOT!
Must have been a girls car
What’s scary is that I have seen this same thing on commercial trucks. Most of those medium duty box trucks running around with juice brakes are driven by morons who can load and unload product but have no business behind the wheel. Can’t count how many road calls we’ve been on because the truck won’t start, put 10 gallons of fuel in and they run perfect.