steering wheel shakes when braking

I forgot to add, depending on how you will use your car and/or how long you intend to keep it, there are several options you can go with your brake job. The very basic is using "OEM quality" parts, which is quite adequate for normal everyday driving. Not advisable to go any cheaper (i.e. "economy" parts), its not worth it. If you plan to keep your car for a while (say 50K+ miles), I'd recommend using conventional "Premium" rotors and pads. If you plan to drive the car hard, you can go all out and get slotted rotors, etc. Obviously there is a sliding scale for the part prices. Fancy parts can cost 2-3X higher than conventional parts. Labor should be the same for what ever level parts you use.

BTW, unless you know the seller, I would strongly recommend AGAINST eBay parts as there are just too many low quality knock-offs out there. I would suggest getting your parts locally from a NAPA Store or equivalent, if you do it yourself. Nothing wrong also with going to a nationwide brake service chain (Speedy, Midas, etc.) . I'm sure you can find a coupon online to save a few bucks.

You have to realize most parts on ebay now have a warranty? So if the seller sells a bad part and wont warranty it ebay will take the money directly from there acct and put it in yours. Ive had no problems with parts off ebay you just have to know what your buying.

A lot of times the parts you get off ebay are the same ones you get at napa with a different box.

A large percent of products in this county are shipped over in containers sent to a repackaging facility to remove the chinese written boxes and labels into english ones then sold to distributors across the country.

Unless your buying name brand parts like acdelco or etc, napa/echlin, duralast, and whatever orielys are are all cheapo chinese crap, period and your paying 20% just for them to stock it in there store. I know as I ran a shop and have bought thousands of parts over the years. Ill explain how the auto parts world works.

Heres how it works I buy brake pads from o'reilly's for 50$ they would sell them to you for 60$ but since you want me to supply them i wont tell you how much i pay. Ill mark them up 40% to you cuz hey i need to make a profit of of everything i do and your to lazy to go buy your own parts. So those pads now cost 70$. But Hey you coulda got the identical ones off ebay for 35$ there just no name parts.

Also midas and jiffy lube and whoever call up napa or o'reilly's to get there parts.

But basically you have to buy what you comfortable with.

amc49 said:

Look at the tie rods first, a very common cause of it. Outer ones commonly.

Most of the posts listing brakes 'warped' have not a clue, the brakes are 'warped' on 99% of all the cars out there and it does nothing at all. I used to cut the discs and drums and know about that scam.

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Process of elimination..................2009 vehicle, no mention of mileage, maintenance done or general condition of the car. You would like to start with tie rods as suspect number one, other posters would like to start with rotors in the number one position. Could be either one, and it doesn't mean that any of the posters are in the dark when it comes to putting up ideas, it just means that we all have are own opinions and past experiences to call upon when putting up suggestions.

What are the symptoms of a warped rotor?
Vibrations from the brakes. Another symptom of bad brake rotors is excessive vibration or pulsation coming from the brakes. Warped or excessively worn rotors may vibrate irregularly and cause vibrations that can be felt in the pedal, and sometimes through the vehicle's chassis.

Most of that has literally nothing to do with the rotor being warped, it is far more likely to be from pad material embedded in the disc surface and the two are different hardness to either make vibration or pulsing. It is most commonly NOT any warp and checking the discs with a dial indicator will bear that out if somebody knows what to look for.

I could show you a disc cut to within .002" TIR and remove it from the cutting machine and simply put it back on and surprise, it is now out by .005" and impossible to get back to that .002" without much fumbling with the setup. How the parts stores use those crap cutting machines to show customers the 'warp' they then 'remove by cutting', the error is built directly into the machine and not able to get it out. It is a function of the way the machines pilot any parts put on them and built into them. That includes most disc/drum refacing machines out there. The one I used was brand new at the time and I messed with it quite a bit to figure that out.

You can have a 'warped' disc up to .010" out of true and not feel it whatsoever as long as the two disc friction surfaces are within .002" to each other. The caliper then simply moves around on its' float to make the runout disappear, the only runout you feel that has to be super close to not feel it in the car is from side to side of the disc, and why you MUST ALWAYS take a cut on both sides at the same time at ALL times to keep that dead on.

Test for disc warp (pad material in disc) or front ties?............on FWD cars the axles pull forward toward each other under power, pulling out any slack in the ties to not shake, backing off on throttle lightly to become neutral throttle neither increasing or decreasing car speed or LIGHT braking will allow shake to start as the axles are not driven so hard forward, they then begin to fall back and bang back and forth in the tie play to shake the wheel. HARDER braking will then make it stop or lessen, as the brakes fully override the power to axles and the axles then settle back on the other side of the play to quit shaking. If the harder braking still shakes or even more then the discs have pad material embedded in them and need to be cut. A further verification check by jacking wheel up and the tire play check at 3 and 9 o'clock, any looseness there is ties likely.

I got most of that pad embedding info from a brake system technical engineer and have never seen anything disproving what he said. I HAVE as a test of the idea taken 'warped' discs that were discolored in spots (the pad material deposits) and sanded them to throw back on a car and the 'warp' disappeared almost entirely but it took a lot of sanding to get there, the deposits harden and then very difficult to remove them. Cutting the disc removes that upper layer of material and the problem is gone with it but everybody thinks you have straightened a 'warped disc, NOT SO!

If you set the rotor up in a lathe and check it with a dial indicator you will always find some runout (warp). I usually set the cutters to take 5 to 7 thou off each side (setting them on the high point). You want to make sure you are cutting both sides at the same time so that you aren't pushing the rotor to one side as you cut. Doing this there may be some areas of the rotor that are not even touched by the cutters. You want to have the rotor so that all of the surface is at least cleaned up. This does remove the warp in the rotor (and the embedded material - which I agree is the main problem).

Be careful as this does thin the rotor which makes it easier to warp. Most large tire shops have a lathe and can do this job. Note that in many cases it is cheaper to buy a new rotor than have the original cleaned up.


I do this a lot on motorcycles as they sit a lot allowing the rotors tend to rust.

I learned to take no less than .010" at a whack, there is no sense in being gentle on the first cuts, it is the last you would want to be gentle on to get a better finished surface. Less than .010" at a cut you spend too much time and money wasted cutting parts.

Pull that freshly cut disc off and then put it right back on and then use the dial indicator a second time, you will get a surprise. Like fresh 'warp' that showed up as soon as you removed it and put it back on. If you don't find it you are not looking. Side to side will stay the same but the overall flatness will change. It is built into the way the machines pilot the parts, the clearance to get the tooling on and off allows for the disc to move around, you get a random difference every time you tool a disc up, even the very same one. You can even mark the disc as to a spot and the mainshaft of the cutter to line up exactly the same and the flatness will not repeat. The pilots used to cut the oldschool removeable wheel bearing discs are even worse than for the flat hat type discs as you are piloting on an angle interfering with another angle and no way is that contact point exact, wear on the races makes it worse.. The .001"-.002" needed to slip the pilots on and off easily translates into up to .005"+ error at the disc surface perpendicularity. You can hold side to side pretty much dead on but overall flatness perpendicular to the axle centerline? No way. Impossible. Why it's so easy to take a customer back to the back to show him how badly his disc was 'warped', well of course it does not settle in at all straight, and impossible to do so. It's a scam there. Even best of the best brands of new premium discs right out of the box will not show to be dead flat there other than by sheerest luck.

Look at your new replacement discs and more importantly mike them, the budget ones are often only .010" or so over the minimum cutting spec, meaning the first 3 months of use typically has the disc too thin to cut even once. Another little scam they don't tell you. When you pay for premium parts you get the extra thickness that better parts come with to be like the OEM parts. The Chinese crap parts are designed to make you buy far more of them. Like their budget wheel bearings that have maybe 5 drops of grease in them to die much faster and the like.