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Pad Sensor

L

Luke_Miller

CEG'er
Joined
Jul 21, 2005
Messages
60
Location
Florida
Thanks in advance for any help provided. It is very much apreciated. I have a 99 SVT.

In shopping for my Pads, I've seen that some are advertised w/o sensor and some with. What is the sensor and why would some have the sensor and others not?

Advance Autoparts has a Werever Rotors for about $30 a pair. To get my OEM rotors turned is going to cost about $20 a pair. It would appear to make more sense just to spend the extra $10 and get new rotors. Or am I missing something.

Advance also had Valvoline SynPower brake fluid that is advertised as "Fully Synethic". Is that just marketing hype?

Thanks again for your comments.
 
AFAIK no contours came with pad sensors, some cougars have them though. For the brake rotors, depending on the wear on those it could be good to change them. And for the brake fluid I would get ATE SuperBlue stuff of the OEM ford heavyduty fluid.
 
i dont remember what brand they were(AC Delco i think), but the last set of pads i bought had wires on them , they matched exactly to my old ones so i just cut the wires off
 
fobCSVT said:
AFAIK no contours came with pad sensors, some cougars have them though. For the brake rotors, depending on the wear on those it could be good to change them. And for the brake fluid I would get ATE SuperBlue stuff of the OEM ford heavyduty fluid.
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Good advice. Get new rotors if you need to, but turning them is fine and yeah it's only $10 you save, but that can go to beer or something.
 
fobCSVT said:
yep, beer is always good when you work on your car :laugh:
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Agreed....

Anyways though, I just decided to replace all rotors and pads on my 99 SVT. Got them from car quest, and they got the rear rotors an pads right, I can get the models if you'd like. They did however mess up twice on the front ones, and Advanced Auto did the same on my brothers 98 SVT (messed up 2 times) I can post the trace I did of my 99 front pads for reference sometime. When I had them ordered I had my uncle do it through the place he works for because the get a discount, 4 rotors and 4 sets of pads cost me about $140. The first set of front pads that they got me I didn't even bother looking at, even though my bro had just had problems getting his right, I just took em an went. Assuming they were smarter than AA, well I got them home to find they had wear sensors, even though I had told my uncle specifically to NOT get wear sensors. He called them up an they ordered new ones, this time I took a trace of the pads with. Checked out the 2nd set of pads they ordered and they were the same as the 1st set, just without sensors.... They guy there goes, give me a minute, he goes in back and comes out with some pads that match perfectly, he then informs me that they were not listed as pads for my model and year.... so... just a little weird... the Car Quest part number I have for front pads is BMD648. Now if only I wouldn't have left my new rotors at my parents house, I could of done my brakes and rotors this weekend.... :( oh well... Hope this helps you out some...
 
Take a look at the illustrations at www.batinc.net and you can see the difference.

The most common brake part numbering scheme used by many (but not all) brake pad makers shows 762 for the early SVT and 648 for the late SVT and the non SVT.

Ford shows the changeover date as 5/99, but it is wrong. It may have been as early as 2/98 which matches the change from E0 to E1.

If the first set of pads matched except for the sensor wires, for what you paid, I would have cut the wires.
 
Luke_Miller said:
Thanks for all the great info. Pardon me for my ignorance but what is the wear sensor?
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On the Cougar's implementation, it's a small metal leg in the pad that makes contact with the rotor when the pad wears to its minimum acceptable thickness.

When the contact probe makes contact to the rotor, it closes an electrical sensing circuit that turns on a warning light in the cluster to the effect that the brakes are worn out.

As noted, the Contour did not have this feature but certain versions use the same size pad as does the Cougar.

Steve
 
Some Mondeos use the feature too.

On how the circuit works. It does not ground through the rotor when contact is made. Instead, there is a complete circuit through a wire loop embedded in the pad. When the pad wears into the wire loop it eventually severs the loop and opens the circuit, turning on the light.
 
My '99 Cougar had those pad sensors and never lit a warning.

I trusted the system to warn me of pad wear, and had to change rotors after calipers ate them. :(

So now I just order w/o cables and visually inspect their wear.
 
chapulin said:
My '99 Cougar had those pad sensors and never lit a warning.

I trusted the system to warn me of pad wear, and had to change rotors after calipers ate them. :(

So now I just order w/o cables and visually inspect their wear.
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Something I could never understand is why the Cougar when optioned with pad sensors only used it on one wheel. If you didn't have even pad wear you could run the brakes clear into the rotors like you did. That was not a wise item to de-content. The shop manual instructions were to cut the wire off the pad on the side that didn't have a place to plug the sensor into.
 
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