As a retrogrouch I’m contractually obliged to dislike disc brakes.
However, while my daily is in the repair queue, I’ve been commuting on a Focus with Sram Rival hydraulic disc brakes. Just to add some context, this Focus was a hard trash find which I’ve been slowly bringing back to life.
In the dry, everything’s fine. In the wet, the brakes squeal like a banshee. Could this be as simple as the wrong brake pads? What brake pads should I be looking for to reduce the squeal? Could it be another issue? I did bleed the brakes during the repair process, but was never convinced I did it correctly. Although they seem to work fine…just noisy…in the wet.
I’ve got aftermarket Galfer pads for SRAM Level T brakes. They are classed as organic, semi-metallic pads. They squeal in the wet badly. So bad it was embarrassingly loud. I found if I rode around and applied light pad pressure they would get quieter after say a minute. Then progressively added more pressure after a short time, then they became quiet. I know it’s a pain, but maybe you’ll have to dry them like that before you’ll get quiet operation. You can try other pads. Maybe ceramic are better for that if you can get them. But then you should expect to go through rotors because ceramic is often very hard.
That’s where I’m at. I tried to apply light pressure to ‘dry’ the brakes when I could see there was a stop up ahead, but didn’t make any difference. In fact, even a light touch would emit a squeal.
^This guy discs. Have had success torching and sanding pads to solve ineffectual-ness and noise. Had to resort to changing discs once as turned out they were at or a tiny bit under the minimum thickness recommended. Beefier material seems to squeal less. Think of it as a sort of inbuilt warning system.
As others have said, for me it was a bit more than drying the disc. I was about to do a steep off-road descent and so I built up the pressure further, slowly, until I was sure I could really haul on the front brake without too much noise. Then went down the hill. Not something I was doing as part of my ride. Something I took time out for.
I was one of the road disc early adopters from about 2009. But I only ride discs on MTBs these days. I seemed to find that front discs don’t appear to like lighter applications without immediate or eventual squealing. Not that rim brakes are immune either. Being able to feather the brakes more is a positive feature of rim brakes IMO.
