It's me again, with another weird noise from my front-end (the car, not mine). This time, it's the brakes.

I've got a sound where it makes a "rough metal on rough metal" *scrnch scrnch* noise when braking, most noticeable braking at low speeds. It seems to happen at two spots on the rotor (first one is always a bit louder), i.e. the slower I go, the longer between sound occurrences until I'm braking slow enough that I can't hear the noise.

I've checked the rotors/pads, pads have plenty of life (7mm+ after 25k of hard driving, score one for Stoptech), no weird spots/rust on the contact patch of the rotor that I can see, so I'm at a loss what would make this location based (again, sound happens at a certain spot during the rotation of the rotor/wheel while braking) noise besides those two things. Maybe a dust shield...somehow? Pretty lost here.

Fix one sound and another pops up, that's a G thang.

 

You said it yourself, you've got a metal on metal noise happening when you brake. Take your front discs and calipers off and take a look, something could have been trapped in there and could be grinding away the back of your discs as you speak.

 

Yeah, but if a foreign object was stuck, wouldn't it be a consistent sound? I didn't check the backside though, I'll get the car on stands and take a look-see. I was thinking it was a small build-up of brake pad deposit (pretty much only been city commuting these last two months) or possibly a small rust spot on part of the rotor, although it's been daily driven so I thought rust wouldn't have a chance at building up.

 

It's somewhat common to get something trapped between the dust shield and the back of the rotor, I'd look there to start with.

 

For some reason the dust shield didn't occur to me, probably because it's behind the rotor and I'm a dumb idiot. That would make some sense, a rough/rusty spot on the backside of the rotor could touch two parts of the dust shield per rotation (most likely the two "broken" edges where the dust shield is cut off and isn't a full circle). Took a small allen key and pried the dust shield a mm or two back around the entire rotor, from what my fingers could tell they were rather close to the rotor in spots (also stuck the allen key like a cotton swab in an ear to get any debris out from in there, although I don't know if any came out). Guess I'll see tomorrow if that fixed the problem, if not she's going on the stands this weekend to do a full teardown and clean (which I may do anyway because that's never a bad thing).

 

How do you resist taking a test drive immediately after working on it just to see whether it's fixed? I know I can't lol

 

Yeah, I'll probably end up going out in the evening when all the Sammamish soccer moms have turned in for the night; difficult to listen to the brakes when someone is riding your *** in their luxo-barge SUV.

Can't wait til I get some time to drive down to Paradise near Mount Rainer, been looking at that road on Google maps and it looks absolutely stunning.

 

Mountain runs are the best, I went through the Steens mountains recently on my way to visit Grandma, it was amazing.

1000' drops with no guardrails and such, felt like freedom.

 

In my area people cruise around the White Mountains in New Hampshire: wide, sweeping 4 lane roads with a stunning mountain backdrop encourage some pretty high speeds with the right crowd...
A Cobra went off the road last cruise and was totalled, thankfully no 1000' drop!