Dumb disc question

[Anonymous]

In the quest to improve the brakes on my bike, I'm considering having the discs resurfaced. Not that they look bad or highly polished by any means. My question is to those who had their's resurfaced....did you notice a helluva difference or just a minor improvement, if any?
Thanks.
Fwiw, the bike (an 1100G) has about 60 k on it and new EBC pads.

[Anonymous]

Re: Dumb disc question

In the quest to improve the brakes on my bike, I'm considering having the discs resurfaced. Not that they look bad or highly polished by any means. My question is to those who had their's resurfaced....did you notice a helluva difference or just a minor improvement, if any?
Thanks.
Fwiw, the bike (an 1100G) has about 60 k on it and new EBC pads.

Have you actually found a place that will resurface motorcycle disks???

[Anonymous]

Disc resurfacing

I haven't looked yet for someone local but I know of at least one place in CA. If worse came to worse I could ship them out. Personally though, I don't think it'll be that hard to find someone around here. I just want to find out if its worth it first.

[SqDancerLynn1]

Not recomended!!!! If your disc is worn to the point you are concerned about it It is probably worn down below the mininum service thickness and should be replaced with a new or good used one.

[Anonymous]

I agree that a disc should be replaced if below the servicable limit but this disc has never been resurfaced. My discs aren't worn so much as they're smoother than when new. There's still enough material left on them to allow resurfacing. I'm curious about whether or not resurfacing will noticeably improve the braking performance.
There are 2 schools of thought re: resurfacing. One is not to (unless the disc is badly gouged) because braking performance is directly associated with contact area (ie. braking surface). With that in mind, a disc that has small ripples in the surface with pads that conform to those ripples will perform better because the surface area is in effect greater than a smooth, flat disc. The other school of thought is that resurfacing the disc will increase the coefficient of friction by essentially roughening the surface. Based on that way of thinking, it'd make sense to grind the surface.
I'd like to hear about someone who had their discs resurfaced/ground.
Thanks guys.

[Clone]

Resurfacing is usually done to remove surface imperfections or glazing. You will have a rougher surface for a while, but your pads will smooth it out in just a little while probably a ride or two. You will not see any long term benefits to braking power. A disk which has hills and valleys will have more surface area, but will also hold on to crap like gravel and water better. So while true you will have more area you will only be able to use the portion of it that the pad can exert pressure on. the sides of the groves will not have much braking power. I resurfaced all four disks on my car when I replaced the pads, braking was much improved (read grabby) until the pads polished the disks.

[Dink]

Al your problem is the EBC disc pads. When I purchased my 1150 it's brakes were horrid ,I thought it must have been because of worn stock pads. I wanted to upgrade my brakes because I was very disappointed in there performance, I put a lot of time and effort into deciding what pads to use. During this research phase I discovered that ALL Vesrah brand pads contain kevlar, so I purchased these Vesrah pads,luckily I did not go with EBC as I was originally tempted to do due to good reports from others, when I removed the "old" pads I discovered that my rear brakes(which had been a bit grabby for my liking) still contained original pads and that the front contained EBC. So I put the EBC pads into my rear brakes(which deadened them nicely) and the Vesrah into the front. Suddenly I discovered the horrid noise an 1150 makes when it's fairing bottoms out on the front mudguard, I had to increase my front fork preload to max to stop it bottoming.
Just so you dont think was a fluke I got exactly the same results when I made the same modification to the Katana 1100 my wife bought me for christmas.
The other thing that you can do is to take to your discs with some emery cloth as this will scuff them up to help seat those pads in better and may improve there performance a little, one other thing did you replace your brake fluid recently?
Dink