Quote:
Originally Posted by civic lover
Has anyone ever converted there disc brakes on there honda civic to drum brakes? Drum brakes are have no drag when set properly.
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No. However, while disk brakes will always have a small amount of drag (the design prevents you from totally eliminating that drag), you can non-the-less make a HUGE difference in how much drag you get by how you take care of (and how you adjust) your brakes. Sadly, most of the "quick lube" type mechanics do a "brake job" easily/quickly, vs taking their time to do a job that is designed to minimize undesired brake drag!
The last time I needed a brake job (on my Honda CRX), I paid my independent mechanic a little extra to take his time to do the "brake job" right. In addition to changing the brake shoes (which every place does), he also very carefully lubed up the moving parts of the disk brakes and adjusted exactly where the pads touched the disk with the goal of having the minimum drag when the brakes were not in use (a step that many brake places don't do). And since virtually ALL old brake fluid increases problems with brake "sticking" (even if only by a small amount), we also replaced the brake fluid with decent synthetic DOT 3/4 fluid (thereby cutting down on any "sticking", since all "brake sticking" results in at least a little extra brake drag).
And just for good measure (since we had the wheels open anyway, in order to work on the brakes), we also used a grease gun and a hypodermic needle to inject high quality (slick and very sturdy) synthetic grease into the wheel's bearings. While the wheel barrings aren't part of the brake system, they non-the-less are one significant source of drag in the wheels, and so I figured we might as well do something about that as long as the wheel was open (for the brake job) anyway!
Of course, even with all these steps, a disk brake system won't go to zero brake drag, because some drag is inherent in the disk brake design. However, if you properly take care of disk brakes (i.e. properly maintain/adjust them, such as my mechanic did for my car), you cut your "disk brake drag" to a small fraction of what it is with many cars. So while the drag from disk brakes will never go to zero (a little drag is inherent in the disk brake design), it's also true that properly maintained disk brakes (and many quick brake change places do NOT go to the effort to properly maintain the brakes when doing a normal "brake job") makes the disk brake drag pretty low/trivial indeed.
NOTE: Don't underestimate the drag built into the wheel itself (such as the drag in older wheel barrings). Not only can that wheel drag be significant, it can sometimes be larger than the drag from the brake system. So if your goal is to get lower wheel rolling resistance (a valid goal for FE), be sure you also keep the moving parts of the wheel (especially the barrings) properly lubricated. i.e. Don't just look at the brakes, when looking at things that cause the wheels to spin less freely!
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