Grinding noise from rear brakes. Dealership told me that the brakes are being redone but wont be done before September. Comments?.
My guess, the parts they need to repair your brakes are not available due to Covid supply chain problems. Is your Enclave shop-bound, completely off the road now? Or are you still able to drive it? If off the road, did the dealership offer you a loaner until the parts come in?
You aren’t alone. I was in a kitchen appliance store, another couple, frazzled, apparently possessed a failed fridge needing a new wiring harness. Salesman: "Well, it looks like this item is out of stock, the best we can do is 7 months. "
The Enclave is known for brake issues.
And when dealers have to replace the same components on many of the same vehicles under warranty, supply of those parts can become scarce.
Tester
I wonder what’s causing the grinding noise? I can see that for a 2015 w/60 k miles. But this seems to be occurring in cars with not that many miles on them. It might be something simple, like a small pebble has lodged in the brakes somewhere. OP, how many miles on your Enclave? Auto trans or manual?
Brand new brake pads can grind if the compound and environmental conditions are just right to create it. Annoying but not dangerous.
Same for brake squeal or groan. A certain GM platform with rear disk brakes had one of the 3 alternatively but rarely a quiet brake. Serious problem at the Delphi brake group.
Interesting. Do you mean the compound the brake pads are made of can cause this? Is it the pad-dust from normal braking that’s getting or sticking to somewhere/something it shouldn’t?
Yes, it is the friction material itself that can cause this…and not the dust.
Friction materials are a bit of a black art. All 3 conditions I cited are rythmic vibrations that get excited by the rotor and how the pad is pressed to the surface when the driver hits the brake pedal. Rotor finish, pad chamfers and grooves can all be a way to quiet the noise…or move it to another pedal pressure point so it doesn’t annoy that customer. But it might annoy another that brakes harder. It can be a tough problem to solve. Some companies are better at solving it.
Ok, I see, not brake dust, but just the pad/rotor interface itself. You’d think since brake pads have been in use for many decades these sorts of design problems would have already been solved. I guess what worked before may be too expensive now, or the materials no longer easily obtained, or b/c of the need to save space and weight in the braking system, modern-car brake designs are running up against some unexpected new limits.
That would explain the wait until September for the revised parts to be released.
I see service bulletins for late model vehicles, some seem to be unchanged for years and now have brake noise. Manufactures have been reengineering brake pads to eliminate materials that are considered to be an environmental hazard and the result sometimes are not good.
Is it your opinion that it’s the “greening” of brake pads that’s making these issues worse? Seems to me that ever since the requirement to remove copper from friction material noise complaints have risen. I have seen several documents from OEMs stating that brake noise is now normal due to the revised material required.
1 Like
That IS what the brake engineers I worked with told me. I tend to agree with them. They swore by asbestos linings because they really did work great with far fewer (car) problems… but asbestos!
They did have these problems even before copper was removed. Mixes with steel particles, stainless particles, copper or bronze particles all had varying degrees of success and problems. The metal is used as a “cleaner” to rub the rust away… but also wears the rotor… so they like to limit it. Unless Europeans…they seem to use a lot of cleaners. If the rotor is worn to the minimum once the pads are at minimum, I never saw that as a problem, but GM/Delphi did.
Do you really think such a vehicle is available with a manual transmission??
2 Likes
As if that makes a difference on the Brakes . 
It should be.
The market (and also fuel efficiency) determines what “should be” and what “is”.
If there was sufficient demand in The US for a manual transmission Enclave, and IF that model was able to produce the fuel efficiency numbers that an automatic trans Enclave could achieve, then GM would offer that variant.
While GM is far from perfect, I think that they have–finally–become capable of reading the tea leaves of consumer demand, as well as observing the inability of most manual trans models to equal the fuel efficiency of modern automatic trans models.
1 Like
Is this a warranty brake repair?
I’m not sure if you’re serious
I doubt it’s worth it for GM to offer this vehicle with a manual transmission
4 Likes
Not sure why you’d think I would know all the option packages available for every car ever made?
We’ve talked about the availability of manual transmissions on this forum numerous times
And every time we wind up saying the same thing . . . manufacturers are increasingly NOT offering manual transmissions, even on sports cars, because people aren’t opting for them
1 Like
Fair enough, but remember I’m a diy’er, not claiming to be an expert on all available car configurations.