Post
by Mh434 » Fri Jun 07, 2019 11:09 am
I agree. The previous owner of my bike had just installed a set of aftermarket "high performance" pads on the rear brake the day before selling me the bike. I noticed that it took a LOT of pressure to get decent braking, but it was great once the rear brake finally got nice and hot.
<<<Fast forward a few months>>>.
I started to notice a grinding sound from the rear end of the bike, but only at near-zero speeds. I figured I'd picked up some dust, and it would clear itself soon enough, as it often does on the other vehicles I've owned. As the days went by, though, it got worse - much worse, to the point that passersby would stop & stare as I crept by. Of course, at the time I was on a week-long group ride, through areas where there were no shops that would carry anything at all to fit a 'Wing.
As soon as I got home, I pulled the rear end apart and had a look. The rotor was starting to get some serious scoring and grooving. I pulled the pads and, among the various bits of paperwork etc. that came with the bike, I found the receipt & information on the pads. They were a very high metal-content sintered pad for racing applications where, presumably, the rotors are considered "consumables".
Thankfully, I caught it in time to save the rotor!
I tossed the pads and tried to find OEM Honda pads locally, with absolutely no success. The local Honda dealer wasn't interested in bringing any GL1500 pads, and had none in stock. I was finally able to find a set of pads that were OEM-equivalent, or perhaps even a bit softer. Once installed, braking was dramatically improved, and the noise was gone.
A few years later, and no new scoring. Braking remains strong & controllable, and there's almost no detectable wear on the pads.
The moral of the story?
As WingAdmin says, stick to OEM pads or as close as you can find. Those GL1500 rotors are getting harder to find, and are breathtakingly expensive. IMHO, it's the pads that should be considered "consumables", NOT the rotors.
Don't take chances on "experimenting" with pads - you may well be sorry.
That's not the real issue though, that means each $16 set was all 3 rotors, yikes thats too cheap to be any good. I returned them and will order pads from Cyclemax like I should have to start. 
I don't know what these would have done, not stopped at all, shredded my rotors, who knows. I decided that well over 1000# of bike and sidecar wasn't something I was willing to experiment with.
