Tips for Inspecting Brakes on a Motorized Gas Chassis

A regular part of your routine maintenance for your gas Chassis, should be checking the front and the rear brakes. Now, it's not something that you're probably going to do by yourself, because most of the brakes on your gas Chassis this one happens to be on a workhorse. So there are some GM components, the engine, the Vortec engine and so forth. But this is a 22,000 pound vehicle. The only way to physically check the brakes is to lift this front end which you're talking 10 to 12,000 pounds and taking the wheel off to visually inspect it. But it is something that you should have a service center do once a year. Now, most of the brakes on the newer Chassis here, in fact all the brakes are going to be disc brakes. The old drum brakes were used back up to about the mid 80s some of the 90s into the back rears, but, it's gonna be a disc brake. So take it into a service center and have them take that wheel off and inspect the thickness of the pad. Now, there are some things you can kind of verify, if the brakes are starting to get a little worn. One of the things is come out and visually inspect the wheel and the hub itself, you'll notice that you're gonna start to get a little bit of a brown and this one actually is pretty good. These brakes are fairly new on this system, they've been serviced but you'll see a Brown dust start to form and the longer you do that or the more you see of that the thinner those breaks are going to get. Now, they will also have a small little indicator which is kind of a squeal and what that is, is just a small little piece of metal and as the brake pad gets thinner and thinner that disc brake, the metal part of it of the pad starts to hit that indicator and it'll give you a little bit of a squeal on the inside. Now, something that I do, not only with the brakes on this but trailers and other things is I use one of those infrared heat guns. And I just periodically check the temperature of that brake pad inside or you can get right in here. So when you're traveling down the road, you know once in a while, just hit that inside and check the temperature of the tire of the hub if it's exposed and if he can get into that cylinder the disc and the inside of it, as you see that heat start to rise, it's kind of an indicator that, "Hey, maybe I'm starting to get a pad, that's getting a little bit worn and it's getting a lot hotter." Now, if you're running about, let's say 75-80 degree temperature outside, it's not uncommon to have 95-100 degree temperature in here, when you stop during the heat of the day. But if you see that spike up into the 120-130 range I'm gonna definitely take that in and get it serviced. Now, some people say, "Well I know it's taking me longer to stop," that's an indicator which could be, however you got to look at what weight you have on this vehicle. You know, if I start out with this one brand new this is a 22,000 pound GVWR unit. Probably weighs somewhere around the 17,000 pounds. I'm gonna stop a lot faster than if I load it up to 22. So if you've put additional weight on, it's gonna take you a lot longer to stop. But important to check your brakes have a service center do it once a year to make sure that you can stop safely going down the road.