Expert: Roland Finston - 1/20/2012

Question
I had my front brakes replaced 11 months ago and the car hasn't been the same since.  I have been to 3 places and they all say the brakes look fine.  One places put another set of rotors on thinking they might have been defective--didn't help.  If I go on several short errands, they seems to heat up and make this awful noise when I stop.  However, it never makes it when I take it to be fixed.  I can't make a terrible noise and two stop signs later there is no noise.  As fast speed--there is a major shaking when I slow down, but once again it doesn't happen all the time.  Any thoughts on what is going on?  Should I replace everything and start over?
Thanks!

Answer
Hi Tara,
I suspect that for some reason one of more of the brakes are not releasing fully when you use them, and thus the pad/rotor for such a brake is dragging (which cause the wheel itself to feel warm compared to the others (or all 4 could be dragging in which case all would be warm). So the first thing would be to feel all 4 wheels after doing some driving and see what the temperature of the wheels feel like. Once that is known you can then go to which ever shop did the the front brakes (if you trust them and believe they might take some reponsibility for correcting the situation which appears to have begun when they first worked on the brakes).
Also, if you can anticipate when the system is going or recently has made the loud noise then I would drive in the vicinity of the shop so that you can bring the vehicle to them immediately in the hope that by so doing they will see exactly what you are saying is the problem. Don't replace everything/start over as that can be unnecessarily expensive.
If you can get one of the shops to whom you have paid money to take responsibility for their error that would be the ideal outcome. The issue will be to first figure why the problem exists now, and then to determine whether what any of the shops touched in their working on the vehicle was responsible for the problem. It might be that the problem came on by coincidence after the first job was done, but that is to be determined. A dragging brake can be due to a faulty caliper/wheel cylinder, a faulty brake hose, or if all the wheels are involved then a faulty master brake cylinder/brake pedal binding up could be the cause.
Roland