My brakes feel funny…

Ever since I’ve swapped the GSXR1000 forks onto my SV650, I’ve felt like the brakes have been a lit­tle off. At first, I thought that the pads were get­ting stuck on the calipers or maybe the fluid was dirty. The first thing I did was change the fluid, since that was fast, and it got a lit­tle bet­ter. I decided, the next step would be to change the pads.

I have decided to go with Ves­rah pads again for this change, which you can buy at Kur​vey​girl​.com. For this change here are the tools you’ll need:

• New Brake Pads
• 5 mm and 3 mm Alan Keys
• 12 mm wrench or socket
• Sand paper
• Anti-​seize lubri­cant or brake grease

First, you’ll want to remove the 3 mm alan bolts that hold the dust cover over the back of the brakes:

Then you’ll want to loosen the 5 mm alan bolt that holds the brake pads in. Don’t take this all the way off yet, as you don’t want the pads slid­ing out. Next remove the 12 mm bolts hold­ing the caliper in. Now you’re ready to take that 5 mm alan bolt out:

After you’ve done that you can go ahead and pull the pads out:

Now this is where it gets fun, what you want to do now is thor­oughly clean the insides of the calipers as well as the hard­ware. This includes the dust shield and the 5 mm alan bolt. After you’ve cleaned every­thing, go ahead and put a lib­eral amount of grease on the back of the pad as well as the sides of the caliper. You’ll also want to lube up any part of the hard­ware that touches the pad, this includes the inside of the dust cover as well as the shaft of the 5 mm alan bolt:

Before you go ahead and put every­thing back together, it is always a good idea to scrub down the front and back of the brake disc with some fine sand paper to get it ready to mate with the new pad.

You can now go ahead and place the pads back into the caliper. Then you should slide the 5 mm alan bolt back into place and tighten it down. Next put the dust cover back on with the 2 alan bolts.

Finally slide the caliper back onto the caliper and align it back with the fork mounts. Go ahead and hand tighten both the bolts before you use the wrench. Use a lot of care when you use the wrench because the calipers are made of alu­minum and there­fore pretty soft.

There you go, you’re all set. You’ll prob­a­bly want to go out and bed the pads so that you can brake cor­rectly. Pump the front brakes until the lever feels firm.

If you’d like more details on how to bed your brakes take a look at my SV650 pad change. The bot­tom has the two ways you can bed your brakes.

So now you may be think­ing, why did your brakes feel weird. Well take a look at this:

As you can see there was clearly a miss­ing piece of pad here. I’m guess­ing that some­thing got stuck in the caliper dur­ing a crash or some­thing. Well either way, I really hope this fixes every­thing… If not then you’ll soon see a write up on how you go about rebuild­ing your calipers.

Tags: 1000, brakes, gsxr, pads, sv650, vesrah