Brakes

Are disc brakes affected by a leaking wheel seal the same way that drums are?

 

now lets see the braking distance from a professional driver looking ahead. the stoping distance is almost 300 feet

 

I bought my first truck with discs this year. For braking performance they are noticeably better than drums, even against a truck with a complete new drum brake system. My next trailer will have discs as well.

Pad life should be close to 500K miles, discs themselves are supposed to be a million miles. We will see. Regardless that is WAY more distance than I get out of a set of drum pads and drums. Disc pads are supposed to a 15 minute per axle end deal.

 

Disc brakes are awesome!!! I’ve owned both and there isn’t any advantage to drum brakes in my opinion. They stop quicker and the parking brake holds better.

To answer some of your questions, yes there is still a wheel seal that can leak on disc brakes. I just replaced one on my truck. And yes like someone else said you have to take the hub apart to replace the rotor. To replace the pads though, is super easy. It’s a clip that you push in and slide a rod out, then the pads just slide out.

I run in muddy conditions and haven’t noticed any problem at all with the disc brakes, in fact I think they do better. There are no slack adjusters to go out and you never need to adjust disc brakes.

The only problem I know of, when you replace a wheel seal you pull the rotor and hub off together and that is a heavy chunk of metal to pull off. You can split the two if you want, but much simpler to leave it together.

 

Are Disc Brakes less likely to Freeze after parking ?

 

An oil seal leak will go out through the ventilated disc and not get into the lining
unless the seal leak is bad. Disk brakes are the future. The horsepower numbers in trucks have been increasing the stopping power needs to increase as well. If I remember correctly the S-Cam brake was the next invention after the wheel.

 

We haven't had a freeze up with out brakes yet and our truck has been in the snow since we received it. We typically don't have issues with our trucks, it's usually the trailers that give us trouble.