Such as, yesterday, the grinding noise from the front brakes that prompted me to discover that, when one of the front brake pads not only gets worn down to the rivets, but get worn down past the rivets to bare metal backing, the rivets have made fairly sizable grooves in the rotor....
Clearly I should have checked that a bit more often; sigh. Not that you could see without disassembling the brakes; it was only the inner pad that was gone. The outer one was ... well, ok, the outer one was in no great shape either, but it wasn't completely dead yet.
But, anyhow, my brother came over, and we used almost all of the afternoon to take things apart and put new brake pads and a new rotor on it, and it should be much better now.
And, meanwhile, in my notes to self about things that a car ought to have, I shall put "brake pad thickness meter". Shouldn't be that hard to implement, really....
- Brooks, who notes that there are advantages to being five minutes from the Napa Auto Parts store
