I bought a Neon from Carmax with 15.8k miles...anyways its up to 21 now, and I was hearing a clucking noise + squeaking on the right side of my car (thought it was the bearings). Anyways, I brought it to Dodge, and they said they cleaned the hell out of the calipers and greased them up a bit, and the noise went away for about a week, but then it came back. At first I thought it was bearings, but the guys at Dodge said my rotors were getting somewhat rusty and I was going to need new pads soon. They said the clucking was because the caliper was sticking to the pad and I would hear it.

Anyways, I am going to go get the rotors resurfaced and new brake pads installed. I went and bought Adaptive 1 Ceramic Brake Pads from NAPA today for $80, and they are charging me $164 for the resurface + pad installation.

What do you think? Is 21k normal for a resurface? What about the cluck + right side squeak, it going away, then coming back? Just rotor rust?

I'll let you guys know what happens after I get this done (sometime next week), but I just wanted to hear some opinions from you guys before I got the work done.

 

Well this happened to me before, but i had a different story.

My wheel studs were weak because i hit a huge pot hole before and i guess it weakened them and i thought it was no big deal. then one day,2 out of 5 of my wheel studs just snapped off and i had to drive to pepboys on 3 studs to get them in.

 

Wouldn't they have known this already though? They've looked at the car a few times, broken wheel studs would be obvious.

 

Whoa that's kind of a lot...$80 + $164 = $264... I just went out and bought new rotors, and premium gold pads (basically like OEM), caliper grease, and brake parts cleaner, and I think it cost me $115 or sobefore tax for all of that. Swap all that yourself in the driveway and it should take you about half an hour.

As far as the rattling/squeeking you are hearing, I had the same problem with the pad binding a bit against the caliper when I braked (on the front drivers-side though)... the pad would shimy-shimy-coco-puff as the rotor slid past it and you could hear the anti-rattle clips oscillating around on the back of the caliper. New brakes fixed the problem, but they were due to be changed anyway.

The noise can be irritating, but in my case it was mostly just irritating once in a while. I don't think actually affected performance or wear that much... I made it almost 80,000 miles on the original brakes.

 

Dam Iowa almost 80k. Wow.

 

heythere's potentiallya lot of corn to drive through out here before you reach a stop sign (or a dear jumping out in front of you).

 

i had to replace my pads at 32k and resurface my rotors. but i do a lot of stop and go driving. ive gone through a set of ceramics from murrays and now i have the red stuff pads from ebc and there drilled and slotted rotors. they def. stop way better than factory brakes