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 Imagine expensive repair bills. Hospitalization. Away from work for a long period of time possibly hampering the road of advancement in your career path. Legal Law suits and counter claims. Imagine how all of these can be avoided if you are equipped with a good set of brakes.
It is always good to be prepare for the unexpected. Situations like Taxis pulling over right in front of you, a lost and clueless driver driving next to you looking for directions. Pedestrians randomly dashing across the roads. And of course having a good set of brakes also means you lower the probability of an unwanted situation drastically. So what do we know about brakes? What is involved in it, what is the science behind it? What do brakes do?
Brake pads are an important component in a brake system. The brakes convert the kinetic energy of your motorcycle into heat, via friction, hence slows down the vehicle. From here we understand that heat is the key factor, it is no surprise lots of brake components usually have something to do with proper cooling and heat ranges. Stopping power is referred to as “brake torque”. Brake torque is measure in terms of ft/lbs to see how much stopping force you can put on a single wheel. Brake torque is formulated via the following: 
From the above formula, you probably have observed that the coefficient of friction plays a major role in brake torque. Let’s recap, braking involve turning kinetic energy of your moving vehicle to thermal energy by friction. However, coefficient of friction is not the only factor you should consider in brake pads. Other then coefficient of friction, another important factor we should pay attention to is the heat range. As I stated earlier, brakes turn kinetic energy into heat. So it is very important that the pad you are using can deal with the heat being created by frequent and hard stops. Most brake pads have listed on the box a two-letter rating to help judge the coefficient of friction at two temperature levels, 200F and 600F. While this is just a rough estimate, it is one way to judge the performance of brake pads. The first letter represents the coefficient of friction at 200F, while the second letter represents 600F.
E: .25 - .35
F: .35 - .45
G: .45 - .55
The higher the ratings, the higher the CoF, which translate to more friction and for you and me higher stopping power.
However, please bear in mind, just like tires, they have operating temperatures.
So for instance if you use a HH rated pads, but you only cruise around, you never heat up the pads to the heat rating of 0.55, the brake pads will not bite...
On the other hand, if you are hardcore demon on brakes, and you use FF rated pads, you find your brakes fading away as you generate too much heat that exceeded the temperature range of the pads.
So there’s really no "BESTEST" brake pads, only the best pads suitable for you. You really have to be honest with yourself. Brake pads can be roughly broken down into about 3 types: Organic - Made of stuff like cellulose, which is like ground up cardboard! The cellulose is held together with a phenolic resin binder which is a heat resistant thermosetting resin. Pot handles and stuff like that is made of phenolics. Organic pads used to have asbestos to give better high temp properties but since asbestos is now a carcinogenic a no-no, kevlar, fiberglass and mineral fillers are now also used. Organic pads have a good coefficient of friction for a light Lever effort, work well at low temperatures and are very quite. They do not work so good for high performance use as they quickly wear, fade, oxidize and crumble. They definitely do not like wet and hence the common complain of how it fail when riding in the rain. Organic pads are kind of old school and are common on cheap aftermarket replacement pads. These pads do not wear the rotors very much. Beware of these as they are worse than the stock pads.
Semi-Metallic - These have some powdered metal added to the mix to help stabilize the coefficient of friction at higher temperatures. Typically powdered Brass, iron or Bronze is added. Chopped brass or bronze wire is sometimes added to help give the pad more mechanical strength. Usually these pads are excellent for all-around use. They can run the gamut from very little metal to almost all metal. The more metal usually means better high temp properties, more noise, more rotor wear and less effective cold braking. Semi-Metallics run the gamut from light tan with metal flecks in them to a dark gray in color. The darker pads usually indicate a higher metal content.
Full metallic - These pads are made of sintered metal with very little binder. Sintered metal is powdered metal that is pressed into a mold at high temperatures until it becomes a more or less homogeneous piece. Pads of this type are pretty aggressive with ones made of brass, bronze or copper or a mix of metals being more streetable and ones using iron being more high temperature oriented. For very high temperature use, ceramic powder is added to the pad material. And they possess all the braking characteristic that a rider needs.
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