I picked up a 2006 TL "Dealer Certified" auto Friday night. When I previously took it for a test drive it seemed fine. Of course it was at low speed in a crowded neighborhood and it was raining so I took it easy.

I immediately noticed when driving it at higher speeds that, when braking, the car has warped rotors. I don't know how I missed it but more importantly I don't know how the person that "certified" it missed it.

First thing Saturday morning I wrote an email to the salesman at Acura who sold me the car. When he didn't respond I called him an left a voice message with no call back. My weekend has been very busy with a death in the family so I didn't pursue the problem anymore.

So the question is what to do? I even bought an extended warranty but brakes are excluded.

I will call service first thing in the morning and if their response is not satisfactory I can quickly stop my sizable deposit check.

Any help or advice would really be appreciated since right now I'm feeling a bit hosed.

 

I just bought my 07 TL-S "certified" from the dealer 1 week ago. In my glove box it had the 150 point check list the car must pass in order for the dealer to extend the warranty out as a "certified preowned." One area was the brakes as part of the 150 pt certification inspection. I would ask to see the 150pt inspection sheet. I have a copy so I'm sure the dealer keeps the original. Hope this helps....

 

Thanks Donnie. I have the sheet and brakes are checked off as inspected. Maybe that just meant there was still some meat on the pads.

It's hard to believe the car was actually road tested since the problem is so obvious. I'm just wondering what my strategy should be with the dealer if they do not cooperate.

I'm a natural pessimist when it comes to dealing with dealerships.

 

If you check the list, under ROAD TEST, it will include:

ROAD TEST
31 Braking (noise, vibration, effort)

So, I guess you'll need to ask them if they truely road tested the TL to make it Certified, how did they miss the out of tolerance rotors. As they may have missed the condition, it's time for them to make it right. Should be simple as may cut the rotors rather than doing a replacement. If they do cut the rotors, get a micrometer and measure the thivkness after they are done. As there is a minimum, and if they are cut below the min, time for them to get some new units on the car.

 

Happy Ending! Called the dealer this morning and they said come right over. They handed me the keys to a new RL and off I went. Now that car is special!

Anyway they replaced the warped rear rotors and all is right in my world for the moment.

I do find it strange that the rear rotors warped and not the front. Of course maybe the fronts had warped and were previously replaced.

 

Sounds great!! I'm going back to the acura dealership today for my gas cap message. Glad your baby is good to go now!~

 

Glad it was resolved. Many Hondas have a problem with sticking rear calipers so watch out for signs of that. I've taken heat readings from front and rear rotors and during normal driving the front and rear run close to the same temps. If you have an infrared temp gun it's easy to catch a sticking caliper.

Also, the fronts are notorious for warping on the 5at. Mine when new would warp if I got any real heat in them and then go back to normal when they cooled. Right now there are tons of heat related surface cracks, going to replace them over the holidays.

I've been waiting for the first brake job to upgrade the brakes to the 12.6" Wilwoods but at 83,000 I'm still on the original pads. If you ever need to do the fronts, consider aftermarket, especially the Wilwoods. They're not *that* much more than OEM rotors and pads.

 

Brake rotors don't warp.

 

Huh? Drive my car and do two back to back hard stops lol.

 

I keep this for special occasions:
http://www.stoptech.com/tech_info/wp...rakedisk.shtml

 

That was fun reading but I'm far from convinced.

Number one is the fact that my brakes are fine until they get a lot of heat in them. If it were only material transfer they would do it all the time. This car has done it since it had 20 miles on it, before it had time to build up any brake pad material on the rotor. It has gotten a little worse over the 83,000 miles but I've also noticed that the rotors are wearing almost as fast as the pads so the loss of rotor material may be the reason.

The advise to not hold the brakes on while stopped after they're hot is good but I don't know if it's for the same reasons. I learned a long time ago that if I used the brakes hard and heated them up I would leave enough room at redlights to gradually roll up to the line. This technique greatly reduced warped rotors, you can imagine a 10 second car with stock 10.5" discs and drums in the back. I was told it caused uneven cooling of the rotor while the car was stopped. You had one super hot area between the pads while the rest cooled.

Regardless, the Wilwoods are going on soon. I don't want to deal with the stock brakes any more. The only thing I'm worried about is upsetting the front to rear bias and increasing stopping distances. I guess it never ends.

 

There are also articles about how much heat it would take to wrap a rotor, a great deal more than what is found during braking.
If the brakes exhibited a vibration when new, could have been a lateral run out problem, from bearing tolerance or hat/rotor machining inconsistencies, but not rotor warping.

 

I would like to see those articles. The brakes have done it since new but only when there's lots of hard braking and it goes away once they cool. I've machined disks before and I've seen the warping. As soon as you make the first cut it's illustrated clearly where the run out is. Whether we call it warping or lateral run out, it wasn't there from the factory in most cases.

This was a good read from that sight. I can only hope other manufacturers but an emphasis on brake bias like they do.

http://www.stoptech.com/tech_info/wp...formance.shtml

Off topic but I finally tested the NT05s pretty well in the rain and the cold.

 

Turbonut I didn't read the reference you gave but I assume you are saying that brake material is deposited on rotors causing vibration. That is sometimes true but not always.

I used to road race Porsche's. They have mighty big ventilated rotors with ducting. You can hardly lift them. During a race session you can see the rotors glow orange at certain corners even though they were ducted. Believe me they warped. You could put them on a lathe and Blanchard grind them and see the warping. Even when so ground they would only last a day or two in a race track situation. Replacing rotors was a major collateral expense of racing.

In a street situation you have a heavy vehicle with small rotors. Yeah some vibration may be caused by pad material depositing on the rotors but that usually wears off with time. I have seen plenty of Acuras, driven by hotshots who abuse their brakes. I am totally convinced the brake system in Acuras is inadequate for spirited driving and hence we get a bunch of warped rotors. Yes some may be vibrating because of pad material but certainly not all.

Cheers,

Jerry

 

A good friend of mine has owned a 944 in one for or another since we were 17. Last one was an S2 and the current is a turbo.

Another friend has (I hope I get this right) a turbo World Cup car. I hope that makes sense. It seems to have many factory suspension upgrades, red tubing accents in the seats, tach has a higher redline, intake manifold looks different, turbo is larger, I think. Rims are not that nice. I haven't seen the car in a couple years, it's perfect but just collects dust in storage.

One bad braking story from the S2, my friend cheaped out and bought some no name pads. I don't have to tell anyone how well these cars stop. I was driving and we were coming down a coast run with switch backs. I was driving spirited but not wreckless. I braked fairly hard twice but only knocking off about 35mph each time and the third time the brakes were smoking and I lost them completely. This was something the TL's brakes would've handled with ease. So as I'm downshifting trying to slow it down, he's already telling me not to say I told you so about the pads.

 

Jerry, if you get a chance, read the article.
Also Matt, if you felt the vibration in 20 miles, it certainly wasn't a warped rotor.
I too have machined 100's of rotors and you can see the high spots on the first cut as you state, but it's build up in various areas causing the high spots rather than a warped rotor. Next time you have a problem rotor, take the time to mic the thickness in many areas and then you will know.

This is one reason why using a torque wrench to tighten the lug nuts helps, as it keeps the rotor with minimum lateral run out and unnecessary contact with the pads to avoid the build up, not to stop a rotor from warping.

 

Turbonut I read the article. Trust me I have a good working knowledge of brake bias. I had a bias valve in my car and could change the bias anytime during a session. It was a valuable tool.

Having said that I have warped plenty of rotors and once warped grinding or turning them only results in a short period of vibration less driving. Even Porsche rotors weren't made out of stable enough metal to withstand lap after lap of heating to 1200 degrees. I know they got that hot because we used temperature sensing paint.

Now that's not going to happen on the street but I am convinced that Acura's are under-breaked which means excess heat. Then you have the fact that you come to a complete stop the pads act as a heat sink and the rotor cools unevenly, helping promote warping.

I know many street driven cars that will never warp their rotors but Acura is certainly not one of them.

I could discuss this subject for a long time but we are way off topic. Interesting read though.

 

Yes, off the OP question, but that was addressed, so:
Jerry, just a quick question, how do you know they were warped and not out of tolerance with build up material?

 

Agreed on the torque wrench.

What I failed to mention last time and for some reason I thought I did, I've had rotors where on the first cut, only half the rotor was touched by the bit. It was not excess material buildup.

I tested the brakes early on and it exibited the vibration the first time they got really hot which was about 20 miles from the dealer. I had to test them out.

 

Turbonut, we used a dial indicator, typically on the very outside of the rotor that was not touched by the pads. The dial indicator would dance on some of these rotors indicating warping.

We could also mount them on a lathe and Blanchard grind them. Again it was easy to see warping on a lathe since you could easily see the outer edges of the disk. Deposits showed up as "hot spots" that were typically blue in color. That was a whole different story.

 

Can someone post the 150 point checklist they use to make a car CPO? I got a 07 TLS last week with no valet key, and wanted to check and see what else has been left off.

Thanks.

 

http://www.acura.com/content/pdf/CPO_150pt.pdf

 

Thanks. Glad your issue was resolved Jerry. Now I need to get on my dealer for a Valet key and 30K service!