Hey everyone. Just had my brakes done today. Hate spending money on stuff that I know I can do myself, but my time needs to be better spent doing house stuff rather than truck stuff. So, I initially went to brake check and didn't like the feeling that they were trying to sell me everything and the kitchen sink. So I went to one of the off road shops here that actually will do brake work for you without having to buy $2000 worth of suspension parts. They assured me they would be cheaper than brake check anyway. Which "technically" they were. The catch was it took them longer to do the job so I paid more in labor than I would have.

Anyway, brake check told me I needed new pads (agreed and purchased Wagner Thermoquiet Ceramics through Amazon), rotors turned (agreed and the shop I took it to took care of that), and calipers rebuilt (didn't agree and shop agreed with me). Brake check also said I needed all new shocks (off road shop disagreed and said my stock shocks still had life).

So I had the services above done today. Looked it over, rotors looked nice and new, pads looked good, I was happy. He did say when they inspected the rotors, they had to turn them slow because the amount of material they had to cut barely keeps them above spec. He said if it was his truck, he still would have turned the stock rotors rather than buying new. Guy said he had already taken care of doing the road testing to mate the pads and rotors. So when I get home, I looked at the rotors and the pictures show what I see. Does that Driver Front look fishy to y'all? Why is it discolored differently than the others? Thanks!

Driver Front:


Passenger Front:


Driver Rear:


Passenger Rear:

 

if your rotors are on the thin side like they said, that is less material to dissipate the heat. so they may have gotten a bit hot there, but i guess it depends on your drive home, amongst many other things..

 

Yes, they did say they were thin. My drive home was fairly trafficky, if thats a word. Just curious as to why only the driver side looks like it does. Is that an indicator that brake check was right and I should have had my calipers rebuilt? Does that indicate that the pad isn't coming into full contact with the rotor? Thanks again for your response!

 

could mean its not seated correctly but it could also be other things. once a couple of the other more experienced guys on here chime in im sure it will get figured out. did it stop better/the same/worse than the old pads, and did it pull to the drivers side?

 

id check it in a few days, the pads may not be exactly flat causing it to drag a little. if it doesn't clear up in a hundred miles id take it back to be checked

 

Thanks y'all. I didn't notice any pulling. Stopping seemed just fine. Didn't really brake too hard on the way home since they're brand new. But had no problems. Pedal felt firm. I'll keep an eye on them.

Sidenote. Anyone else think 4 hours of labor seems like an inordinate amount of time for a brake job being done by a shop with a lift? All they did was take wheels off, disassemble brakes, removed rotors (sent those to a shop to be resurfaced), reinstalled rotors, installed new pads and put it all back together. Seems long to me.

 

for my dad and i on the weekend 4 hours sounds about right. for a professional shop with a lift and air tools that specialize in brakes? ya 4 hours is too long imo

 

How much time did brake check say it would take to do it??? That is the brakes.

 

They said they'd have it done in about an hour and a half to hour and 45 minutes. I didn't go with Brake Check, because I didn't like the feeling they were trying to sell me everything possible.

 

4 hours?? They obviously charged you for the total time the truck was on the lift, even when they weren't working on it. Did they charge separate labor for turning the rotors? I just did my brakes last weekend. I was able to install the new brakes and a leveling kit in about 4 hours. The brakes alone would have taken less than 2.

FYI, I did notice that my drivers side front caliper seemed very sticky and one of the dust boots was torn on the caliper piston. The symptom of this was that wheel had way more brake dust than the others. There's no sensor that says your calipers are bad, but the shop could have seen a leak or noticed a large buildup of brake dust. Without taking the calipers off and messing around with them, there's no way they could have known for sure. Maybe they just knew that 04+ F-150s have calipers that are prone to failure.

I did buy a caliper rebuild kit online for less than $6 shipped. I plan on at least replacing the outer boot. I don't really want to completely disassemble the caliper and replace the piston seal. How much were they going to charge to rebuild the calipers?

 

He said around 100 when he texted me, not sure if that's high, low, or average though.

 

Sounds like they may have used the flat rate labor book. I don't know what those numbers are for a brake job, but most shops use it regardless of what the actual time is.

 

Thanks. They pulled it in at 10:00am with me there and had it on the lift removing the wheels. I got a call saying they were done at 4:00pm. They charged me $30 per rotor to have them resurfaced at O'Reilly's. Then they charged me 4 hours of labor. Thats an hour a wheel.

And yes, I believe thats what they told me. They (BrakeCheck) gave me a printout but without prices and they were trying to sell me on the full brake job, new shocks, and I can't remember all the prices. But I want to say they were talking around $450-500 for my brake service. So I came out at about the same price, but I would have had more "services" performed at BrakeCheck.

 

I thought that turning Rotors was a thing of the past?

With them being so economical to just buy new and all

 

I was considering buying new but on here the popular response was that stock rotors were the best way to go.