by mike-s » Wed Aug 02, 2006 5:54 pm
Well it does take a few km to bed in propperly, remember when you bought the pads, they were perfectly smooth, wheras the discs have waves and imperfections in them that it'll take time to wear the pad to bed into, that's the only other thing i can think of causing it to take some time for the pads to bed in.
If your really sure it isnt a problem with bedding the pads in then the first thing to check would be that all the pistons were able to move in/out freely, one could have gotten caught on crap on the brake walls, etc. (when i rebuilt my front & rears, i found that before i cleaned them out & replaced the seals. On every caliper, one piston was always a bit stiffer to respond than the other due to crap getting in between (this is unfortunately normal), it looked like the seals hadn't been replaced in over 40,000km at least.
You can check this by taking the caliper off one side, taking the brake pads out, putting a g clamp around one piston to stop it moving out, and hitting the brake lever, if after one or two presses of the brakes it doesn't move, put the g clamp on that and move on to the next piston, and clamp up the old piston. If it works fine, just use the g clamp to squeeze the piston in again to where it was beforehand.
if they aren't working that well, well time to buy a new brake seal kit from kawa and take to your calipers with a toothbrush & various nasty chemicals.
If they all work fine, then either you have inferior brake material, it is taking a hell of a long time to bed the pads in, if they are rather high performance pads, they take ages to heeat up to operating temps (a good example is racetrack brakes) or you have air in the lines.
Good luck

If it hurts, you aren't doing it right.