I recently replaced the brake discs on my Subaru. Bought a NAPA replacement for a little over $80. They don't turn them any more. Today I got thinking about it. They were made overseas and sold here. I looked into modern manufacture of disc brakes and found this video. While they still use scrap, about half of the video shows the quality control and the precision used in the manufacture. The second half of the you tube is on ball bearings. Interesting but not part of discussion on brake disks. . Compare the manufacture in a third world country. No quality control, no heat treatment and massive cuts on the lathe to save time, but introduce stresses. But the finished product in the box looks the same. Note that they didn't even use a pump to get the waste oil to make the molding compound and that the man putting the scrap metal into the furnace did add some materials other than the scrap alone, a bag of something, looked like some coal and some stone. I loved that Swiss Army "shovel" that kept popping up in the molding and casting process. To cure the casting molds to allow for the hollow space between the two faces, they built a fire on the floor with wood in the oven to create the heat. The real lesson is that with some jigs and fixtures and minimal technology, about 1920's level, a lot of what we now have, sans electronics, could be reproduced by people with skills and junk inputs after a collapse. We would have to recreate it, but it could be done. We could not build an electric arc steel furnace, but we could rebuild the 1900 type top loading hand fed furnace and melt lower quality steel to machine on manual lathes and drill with a jig to align holes.
We gave up our self-sufficiency and it is now happening with our food --just look at where ir comes from ---it ain't here
As much as i can mine comes from my own garden, the fields, streams and the woods. I was looking at some goosefoot plants today in the fields.
back in the 80s and 90s. Brake discs had extra meat on them so you could turn them to true them back up. You might have had 4-5mm of meat on them. And they weren't cheap but you could turn them maybe up to twice before you needed a new rotor as long as you didn't let your pads get down to rivets .. ditto for the drums. Then the early 2000s. Yeah, you had about 2MM at best. BUT .. they were cheap enough to replace when they warped. Seriously, as long as you weren't talking about a dually or 1 ton or sports car, rotors were about 30 percent cheaper than before. Granted, there will always be high end, drilled, slotted that will always be expensive. but your daily driver ... rotors got cheaper. Pads .. not so much. You pick your price you can elcheapos from china/phillipenes but there are still some machined in the US and Canada available. Some of them even with ground surfaces vs turned and then sanded. Today, every part on a car has a bean counter counting the pennies. and less material and minimum quality requirements = more profit. two dollars saved per rotor and 20 million vehicles is a difference of 80 million dollars ... the manufacturer only needs it to make it to the warranty period.
