The pads are coloured blue to aid their identification and save valuable time in busy workshops and garages. They use a friction material that has been specifically engineered for commercial vehicles and are sized and profiled for optimum contact with the brake disc. The design includes a slot that serves to collect and extrude dirt to help maintain maximum braking effect.
While the pads are blue, the friction material is coloured green on the working surface. This is a condition monitoring aid: once the green begins to fade, it is time to change the pads.
Jost says that truck operators in the UK are increasingly adopting modern disc brakes in preference to traditional drum brakes for a number of performance and maintenance reasons.
“In the UK, disc brakes are already popular with tanker and tipper operators,” explains Danny Broomfield, JOST UK sales director. “They are also becoming the preferred choice for other types of vehicles as they offer significant benefits over drum brakes. For instance, disc brakes do not need the frequent resetting that is required with drum brakes, reducing the service time and improving safety. Further, in operation, the brake performance won’t fade due to build-up of heat.”
The pads were tested against relevant ISO and ECE R90 standards, including laboratory tests and long-term road tests. For the latter, the brakes were fitted to vehicles that were used all over Europe, experiencing conditions ranging from winter snow and ice of the north to the searing heat of the Mediterranean coastal region. In total more than 7,000,000km were covered during testing.