Yeah the last mechanic shop I was in (just a regular "works on minivans" type place, but they're pretty good in my experience so far), when I was talking about rotors with them, the mechanic there seemed to be of the impression that the mfg failure rate on normal brake rotors was pretty high. Said he "often" has to lathe brand-new rotors just to get a customer's car to stop vibrating, and thus he didn't think it would be that astronomically unlikely for me to get 3 bad ones in a row (at least one from each pair, anyways), if I was just putting em on straight out of the box.
I didn't dial-gauge the first set of RA's, and I did it wrong (wrong specs in hand, see earlier) when I put on the first set of Z1's, so I can't even say for sure if they were out of spec when installed, or just were of insufficient metallurgical properties to take the abuse. The second set of RA's were definitely bad out of the box. Very first test/bed drive they were shaking. This most recent set of Z1's, though, definitely dial-gauged under 1/1000th runout at the outer edge torqued down, and then drove flawlessly.
I really don't mind that I did the other maintenance along the way. Those tie rod ends, bearings, ball joints all had some significant wear on them anyways at 32K miles (and by my last estimate, a little over 1K of actual track miles so far).
I may just have to do a complete BBK at some point in the future. For now I guess I'll chew through cheap rotors at whatever rate they die for a little bit longer.
Last edited by wstar; 09-02-2012 at 09:11 AM.
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