Sometimes brake rotors don’t want to come off of the hubs. I’ve posted about this in the past. When the center, also called the hat, doesn’t want to come off of the hub, hitting the rotor with a hammer can cause the part the pads ride on crack and break off. The rotors on this particular car didn’t want to break free from the hub, so I had to use a different method, which led to a different type of cracking.

Most rotors have threaded holes in them that allow you to screw some bolts in. When you tighten the bolts, they push against the hub, pushing the rotor off. Because of how stuck these rotors were, I could see the surface of the rotor hat flexing as I tightened the bolts, to the point that they actually started to crack before the rotor finally came off. Now while this may not be in a super critical part of the rotor, I don’t want to reuse rotors that have any cracks, so even though I was just going to resurface these, I ended up replacing them completely just to be safe.

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-Dan