What do you think?

My custom softail is eight years old. Bought new. Almost a 100 000 kays on it.

Went to the HD dealer in Brissie, New tyre, front and back, The standard dunlops Harley supply, New front brake rotor, new pads. I usually replace rotors and pads myself but didnt this time. Ridin it about 2500 kays since. All of a sudden, the front brakes squeel like buggery when its raining. I pulled the pads out, All wearing evenly, Rotor is not bent and has consistant thickness all around. Measured with a micrometer. Caliper bolts all good,ect. Soon as the rain stops, no sound or squeeling from front brakes. Brake fluid fine and doesnt leak or weep. The black paint on the front master cylinder is flaking off but thats been doing that for a couple years so I cant see that as a fluid issue. Never had to top up fluid and dont need to now.

Its never happened before. I just cant find a reason. Ive never had an accident on this bike and never accidently bonked the front end wheel into the end of the shed wall or anything silly like that. Got me scrathing me head. Did Harley maybe change pad material or somthing like that? Never had this issue on any bikes or my road traily either, I have ridden the Harley at various speeds and taken my hands off the handlebars for a sec, No vibration, no pulling to this side or that. Runs straight and smooth.

Cheers mick

I had a shop replace my front brake pads and they replaced the hd pads with a set of bendix pads supposedly for my model. They ended doing exactly the same as you mentioned. After checking everything, reassembling and cleaning all components with no remedy from the squealing i got the shits, went to harley heaven and bought a set of oem pads. When i compared them, the oem ones to the bendix,they had a different shape and a plastic sheet type of backing on them which the bendix did not have. Replacing the pads with oem fixed my problem and 20000kms later, still good. see if you can compare your new pads to oem. May be the same issue. Hope all goes well

As berserker said but it's not the pad ,it's the contact of the rear pad to the piston and clips to the caliper
Friction squick Same thing happens on any thing with disc brakes no matter what type of pad Some pads have shims / a grip type stuff on the back of the pad to reduce/ stop it you can by a bottle of of orange brake squick stop from repco. Or covs made by crc which you apply to the back of the pad which stops this of used it hundreds of times to fix this problem on cars / bikes it's really annoying when you pull up at a set of lights on your pride and joy and this shit happens just as you pull up

Thanks for the advice, Will buy a bottle and try it out.

Just out of curiosity, Does this squeel occur due to piston face wear or spring clip loosing spring tension or something. I ask as this has just started to occur after almost 100 000 kays.

its hard to say without physically seeing the caliper. given the kms you've done both could be quiet possible. If oem pads c/w the backing dont fix the squeaking id be tempted to buy a caliper rebuild kit and go from there. Providing that the replacement pads were not oem, $70 hd pads would be the quickest option as they take less than 1 beer to change.

I personally tried the stop squeal stuff with no success in my particular instance that i described above. Worked many times on commodore brakes though.

Hope it gets fixed up soon mate

Dunno about your brakes Mick, but 8 years old with 100,000 ks is impressive.

hi Mick,
Being new rotors as well makes me think that they might not have cleaned them with brake cleaner prior to putting them & the new pads in. The residue on the rotors may have contaminated the pad surface?
rob

My pads started squeeling when wet and the mech shoved some red goo (came from supercheap) on the back and all was good. He said the squeel was actually caused by vibration when breaking and the wet (or dust) just makes the problem worse.