A Quick Word About.......Brake Pads

Brake Pads

Replacement front disc brake pads are available at a reasonable price but people in the know (and with very long memories) say they are not as good as originals. As people who know about these things, I'll let Citroen Classics tell the story. From their website HERE:

Textar used to make the original brake pads for D models and these were sold via Citroen and later via the aftermarket. They were a bit pricey, but by far the best brake pad available.

Original Equipment - 'Textar' brand brake pads

An inferior alternative came on the market at about half the price and so many people bought the cheap alternative, oblivious to the shortcomings of these pads and only seeing the price, that demand for the good Textar pads dropped to the point where Textar stopped making them. Now people who actually drive their cars and notice if the brakes are working properly or not and who want/need the good pads cannot get them.......

So there you have it.......

From my longish memory, in the 1990s Textars were about £80 and the cheap replacements were about £40. £80 in the late 1990s is equivalent to about £140 now. If you can find a set, Textars will cost you about £250 or more - so you can see how their scarcity has pushed prices up........

So what would you get for your money? In particular, the Textars are felt to be superior as their fin arrangements aided air flow and brake cooling - and so reduced the chances of brake fade. The backs on some cheap copies were, and are still not, finned.

Reproductions: poor fin design (photocopyright Der Franzose)

Now it should be said at this point that if you shop around, you can find reproduction brake pads that are (visually at least) virtually identical to the Textars - though of course the brake lining material will have been changed to meet modern asbestos-free safety requirements.

Copies and Textars (photo Copyright Citroen-Andre)

Anyway, I dug out the pairs of pads that had been removed from my car back in 2014. YES – they were Textars! I would have been happy to put those back into service except….when I dug out the second pair I found that the wearing pad surface of one had broken away from the backing plate – and not cleanly either. It looked quite crumbly.The mating surfaces were both grubby – suggesting the break had happened sometime ago and probably when the car was in use.

I must have discovered this when I first dismantled the brakes several years ago – it had just completely slipped my mind. Even if I could find an adhesive to reset the pad, I felt it was just too crumbly to give a good fix – and I didn’t want to risk a pad breaking up when in use.

Maybe this loose pad goes some way to explain the embarrassing and irritating low speed ‘farting’ my brakes would make when the car was stopping and virtually at a standstill (walking pace down to stopped). I do know there are other possible causes for this though.

This is probably a good time to explain how the wear warning indicators work. With the ignition on, a positive signal is fed from behind the dashboard to wires embedded into, and below the surface of the brake pads. My broken Textar is of some use here: 

Back of brake pad showing wear warning indicator wire embedded

When one or other of the pads wears down sufficiently far to expose the wire, it is earthed through the disc to the chassis completing an electrical circuit. This then illuminates a warning light on the dash. This warning light varies according to what dash your car has, but mine would look something like this:

Dash warning light - in this case showing low hydraulic pressure (Photo: Kelvin Ming)

I had picked up a set of NOS (new old stock) Ferodo brand pads many years ago – but these were the ‘ID19’ version without the electrical wires that connect to the ‘brake pad wear’ warning light. They have lovely fins, though I'm just noticing that while the pads themselves are the same size as the Textars, the backing plates are a different shape and bigger. it remains to be seen whether they will fit. I suspect they are for a pre-1966 car.

I checked my other gearboxes but no spare pairs of pads. They had already been removed. Bugger.

I can either:

- Use my Ferodo pads without ‘wear warning’ wires (assuming they fit)

- Try adding wires – but risk weakening the braking material in the process

- Buy some modern replacements with wires

- Find a part worn set of Textars from elsewhere

- Seek out some very expensive Textars.

In My Dreams: A Lovely new Set of Textars

It’s good to have choices. On the serious side, I’ve got time to explore this: swapping up pads at some point down the line should be straightforward.