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Brake disc machining - cost?


Kimjon

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Out of interest, what the cost getting your brake discs machined?

I could approach this a number of ways?

○ take discs off car, take them in for machining?

○ just drop car in and get them to do it all?

○ just buy new discs for $150 a pair?

○ or I could do it myself at home on my lathe, but I'd prefer not to as I'd have to make up a fixture for the lathe to hold the disc...more trouble than worth if new discs are only $150.

 

Any clues what the going rate is for machining?

 

Cheers

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with places like https://www.rockauto.com/ and a bit of waiting your gonna come out on top with new disks just about every time. 

As a apprentice we would take hand full's of vt-vz commo disks down the road to the the shop with the brake lathe and exchange them out for ones hanging on the wall that were all done. 

It was kind of ok as the economies of scale worked... but

new disks in this corner. 

 

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Thanks guys, appreciate your advice. Crazy how cheap some places are selling new replacement parts. Found an aussie website selling 2x new front rotors for $85 including new brake pads, or $60 excluding pads. And they ship to nz!

So I think that's what I'll do, as I can wait a few weeks.

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3 minutes ago, kyteler said:

Use their own shipping. No need for third parties.  Try and keep all your items from the one warehouse and you'll save money too.  You can't always of course but it does help.  

 Cool will give it a go! 

How do you tell what warehouse they are from? Do you need to search via warehouse?  such an oldschool website. 

 

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Years ago I had some machined while still on the car, they had a fancy machine to do it.

Recently I asked the wof guy to check the brakes on my wifes car because I could feel a wobble under braking. They were a bit warped, he reckoned better off going new because warped ones are likely to warp again quickly after machining. 

I guess it makes sense if they are unevenly heated when warped?

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9 minutes ago, My name is Russell said:

 Cool will give it a go! 

How do you tell what warehouse they are from? Do you need to search via warehouse?  such an oldschool website. 

 

You throw stuff in your cart and then it'll have little truck icons with letters or numbers on them to indicate whether they are from the same source warehouse when you're browsing for more stuff.  Pretty neat little feature. 

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I dropped a bunch of coin there last night and didn't know about that. 

I used to get rotors skimmed for $20 a pair. So that was my go to. But now that ship has sailed, and a mechanic at work said yeah, thinner discs have less thermal mass and will tend to want to go wobbley again.  And new rotors are so cost effective I just say fuck it now and go new.  

I got stung $90 to skim two last time. So that's a big game over cobber for the skimming guy from me.

 

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2 hours ago, Ghostchips said:

I've wondered has anyone tried the "spin the disk while running a grinder with sanding pad against the disk' method.  It's shit but for a crap daily might be ok?

This sounds ruff as fuck but I reckon its better than thinking you can use a normal lathe tooling setup to do it at home and get a guaranteed decent result. Plus it'd leave a decent cross hatched surface unlike a cutting tool would. I've seen attempts at skimming rotors on a lathe before. I've seen what happens when a single sided lathe tool hits a hard/hot spot and minutely bounces. If you can exert accurate control over a grinder there are a lot of things one can do in the shed-rat world and expect professional level results. I reckon anyway.

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Have always just gone new discs, not badly priced and you know they'll last aaaaages. That and you don't need to have the car down for more than a Sunday arvo.

Can only imagine that when they are near minimum thickness (after a skim) they'd heat up pretty quick as mentioned. Which would surely impact braking performance, mo heat mo problems.

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