Originally posted by Ralphie
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The rotors aren't actually trash. They are a little small, but the biggest cause is the brake pads. When they get hot, they leave deposits on the rotor surface, which causes the shimmy problem. If you think about it, thousandths of an inch of unevenness make all the difference, so the pad deposits would be capable of that.
That said, there are a lot of road racers that will keep stock Honda rotors and upgrade to better pads and the problem not only doesn't occur anymore, but it can actually clean the old rotor if they are aggressive enough. The dealer is obviously going to only stick to OEM stuff, so they just machine the rotors and put new pads on, which cause the problem to recur again down the road. So people who are not informed about it just assume that it is the rotors warping. The pads simply aren't designed for heat capacity, they are designed for dustless, quiet driving at all costs. However, I can verify that this was a recurring problem on both of our 7th gen Accords, and our 8th gen. I don't know if it has occurred on either of our 9th gens, but I am pretty sure it hasn't happened on the sedan we bought new.
The Si's would do the same thing if you got the brakes hot enough, but I typically was more of a momentum driver that didn't ride the brakes as hard (shouldn't be driving that stupid on public roads anyway), so I never had a problem.
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