REPORTING BACK. Shudder at 100km gone.

[anonymousmoose]

I know ever since I joined I have been on about the steering shudder at freeway speeds.

Well two weeks ago I got continental tyres from Alf Barbagello's. The shake was worse

But I took the car back on Friday last week and they did the balance again and now for 4 days I have been driving on the freeway shake free

However, I got a shudder when I brake from 100-80km/h. I think its the discs. I was caught in the Perth 'natural disaster' storm and was driving into deep puddles (not deep enough to come up to the doors of course). What I think might have happened is that the brakes got warped being hot and then hitting the cold hail water. Am I correct to think this?

Also, got a quick question;

If I get my brakes changed or machined, will it affect my now prefect wheel balance and alignment? I paid good money to barbagello and dont want their work ruined by my local workshop.

[Sean880]

Brake shudder is what you have and it is very common on these cars.

The wheels will have been balanced off the car so machining the rotors(disc) or replacing them will not affect the balance job on the wheels/tyres. (Balancing the wheels off the car does not of course rectify any weight imbalance which may be present in the rotating hub and disc. Some specialists can balance the front wheels bolted up to the car (I have had it done many times on various cars) but very few can do this now.

Machining the rotors or replacing them with new ones should fix the brake shudder problem for a while but it will come back as soon as there is any significant distortion in the disc. Replacing the rotors on these cars is not expensive so that is probably the best option if you still have the original rotors on the car and they have already been machined a few times. (To machine the rotors they remove them from the hub anyway so you might just as well invest in new ones). You should replace the brake pads also.

I was informed by a senior holden dealer mechanic that the alignment of the disc on the hub is also fairly critical to fully eliminating brake shudder. He suggested that they had found that unless the disc was sitting perfectly true on the hub that you would not totally eliminate brake shudder.