Front brakes

mkirsch wrote:

BurbMan wrote:
The brakes are working as designed. The front brakes are bigger and designed to do most of the stopping when the truck is loaded. If the front brakes went to work with the box empty the truck would go sideways in an instant, especially on a wet road. The proportioning valve is set to have the rears do most of the work when the truck is unloaded to keep it in a straight line.

Drove trucks with rear drum brakes for many years. Rear brakes almost never worked because they were drums, the adjusters would rust up, and they'd wear out of adjustment quickly. Rear brakes were always in GREAT shape when it came time for brakes because they were out of adjustment and not doing anything. Not once, ever, did the truck ever try to swap ends because only the front brakes were working.

Didn't want to be the first to make this comment, but I agree.
There's a reason that front brakes are never smaller or less capable and generally always larger with more stopping force than rear brakes on ALL vehicles. (keeping it to disc brakes at all 4 corners, as comparing disc to drum would be far more complicated).
Has nothing to do with pickup trucks and their ability to carry large amounts of cargo. It's just simple physics. When a vehicle is moving forward and brakes are applied, weight bias and correspondingly traction is INCREASED on the front wheels. Doesn't matter if it's a pickup with a 4000lb payload or a sports car with perfect 50/50 weight static weight bias.
The only vehicle(s) that I've seen that used up rear brakes faster than front brakes are my wife's SRT8s. And I was stumped by how a set of rear pads, same brand/model, replaced at the same time as front pads, same rotors was wearing the rear pads down faster. What I found was during acceleration, if wheel spin was detected, the car would apply braking force to the rear brakes to control minor wheel spin prior to defaulting to traction and stability control engaging.
Given that the car(s) are 450-500hp rwd and driven frequently in the rain, the car was likely applying rear brakes to some extent alot of the time when taking off from a stop on wet roads. (Also explained why the car appeared to get better wet traction than it felt like it should have)
New SRT8, generally parked during the wet months here, hasn't shown the same wear, compared to the old one that was a daily driver all year around.