The Heavy Duty Parts Report
In each episode, Jamie Irvine and his guests have conversations that empower heavy-duty people. They discuss tips, tools, and technology that help heavy-duty parts manufacturers and distributors sell the right parts to fleets, repair shops, and truck operators.
The Heavy Duty Parts Report
How Air Disc Brakes are Different from S-Cam Brakes
Episode 274: Buckle up, as we take an exciting journey with Mike Konrad, the President of Bremskerl CV, who will shed light on the ins and outs of air disc brakes in the commercial vehicle scene. We talk shop about the trends in air disc brake adoption and the vocations driving these trends headlong. Gain a deeper understanding of the safety components of these brakes and how they square up against S-cam brakes. Worried about cost and aftermarket options? We've got you covered.
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You're listening to the heavy duty parts report. I'm your host, jamie Irvin, and this is the place where we have conversations that empower heavy duty people. August 20th to 26th 2023 is break week. Not that long ago, we did an entire episode dedicated to SCAM Foundation Breaks. Today, we're going to talk about air disc brakes, and to do so, my guest is an expert in air disc brakes. I'm really excited to have Mike Conrad, president of Bremskirl, on the show today. Mike, welcome to the heavy duty parts report. So glad to have you here. Thanks, jamie, looking forward to it. Right, so we were introduced by a mutual colleague in the industry. It's what I love about this industry It's filled with great people and you're usually only one degree of separation. So maybe let's start off our conversation today to give people just an idea of like. Where are we at with air disc brake in 2023 in the commercial vehicle space?
Speaker 2:Yeah, certainly, and I think you had a previous episode, if I'm not mistaken, with Stephen Roberts from BBB. Had a lot of the facts on the head in terms of adoption rates, things of that nature. But we're certainly seeing a pickup on air disc brake by a lot of national fleets and then it's rolling over into second generation as well. Really is dependent on the type of fleet. At the end of the day, a lot more vocational fleets bucking discs and then more and more line hall over the road operators as well.
Speaker 1:Right, when I was selling parts, pretty much it was buses And that was it. And now what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot more tractors and trailers with air disc brakes. So when you talk about vocation, what are some of the vocations that are really driving adoption of air disc brake?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say the two biggest ones that we see are ready mix and roughies.
Speaker 1:Okay, and what makes those particular vocations get more out of an air disc brake than an S-cam? What performance enhancements were they looking for?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say certainly from the customers that we do business with out there. a lot of them are safety oriented. They all run heavy So they want to be able to stop. A lot of these guys stop frequently and safety was a big priority for them. And I'd say, secondly, what we're seeing a lot of is the ease of change and brake pads over changing traditional drum brake lining shoes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean there was over 24 parts in the dual pin design for S-cam And that's not including the brake kit that has hardware and two shoes. So there's a lot of moving parts. Disc is certainly a lot easier. You know, one of the things we talked about in our episode on S-cam, we actually brought back a original interview that we did all the way back in 2019 with a former president of Marathon Brake. He's now since retired And he was talking with S-cam brakes about the realities of fade and how that performance characteristic is. What's the main difference between an S-cam brake and how it fades under extreme temperature and brake application versus an air disc brake?
Speaker 2:I mean inherently the design. you don't have the same type of fade characteristics as you would with a drum brake. That being said, you could still have some fade characteristics, dependent on the materials that a person is using in the application, But, just like your passenger car, when they went from drum brake to disc brake, the fade issues pretty much went away.
Speaker 1:So if safety is an issue, like you said, with ready mix or with refuse especially refuse you're driving in people's neighborhoods all the time, You know. obviously there's that safety component. Let's talk about total cost of operation. So you already alluded to the fact that maintenance costs are driven up by the number of parts that you have to replace and the associated labor. What other ways do air disc brake lower the total cost of operation for fleets?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the difference in cost between a disc brake system and an S-cam brake system from a replacement standpoint. If all you're doing is changing brake pads, it's great. But if you have to start digging in and you have to start changing rotors, you have to start changing calibers, then the cost scenario is not really good. At the end of the day, you don't want to have to change disc rotors, you don't want to have to change the calipers, and so there's some preventative maintenance that you want to do. You want to be smart in terms of what you do with picking out brake pad selection as well.
Speaker 1:Okay. So when I was selling parts one of the things I remember with calipers there was an issue with core return And I remember, if I remember correctly, you had to have an actual, genuine product. It had to be in the original box, like it was really a big deal. I was like who still has the box from the core? But apparently that's what was required. So, when it comes to the availability of aftermarket options, what's been the trend with that? I mean, i assume your company is heavily involved in that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pads, there's lots of options. Rotors you have two flavors, You have Mid-America and you have Chinese. You've got some other country of origin options as well. And then calipers. calipers are a little challenging. You've got OE, you've got some OE reman, and then you've got some aftermarket reman as well. That's out there. Cores are a really big challenge, especially for some of the less popular calipers.
Speaker 1:So, when it comes to the different things that would lead to premature failure of rotors and calipers, you mentioned that preventative maintenance is needed. Walk me through that in more detail. So how does a fleet avoid those additional costs and how do they make it so that they just have to change pads And it is a cost improvement for them, sure?
Speaker 2:And when you're talking about I'll take the brake pad and the rotor combination for a moment When you're talking about brake pads, you want to have something that's going to be friendly on the rotor while still being safe, And those exist. One of the biggest things is, I think, a lot of technician training too. I can't tell you how many times we've seen in the field where somebody's put a pad in backwards or they let the pad get down to the underlayer or whether that's a mesh or NRS fingers or something of that nature, where it gets into the rotor, that rotor's trash, throw it away. You don't have a lot of fleets out there turning rotors at this point in time.
Speaker 2:Calipers, on the other hand, are a little different story. You know, the biggest failure point that we've seen on calipers is really on the slide pin boots. If the technician is looking for tears, if they have a good preventative maintenance cycle, they'll catch these things. But if they don't catch these things, that's when you start getting an ingress of dirt or water and you can start seizing off those slide pins And when that happens, your caliper's done.
Speaker 1:Right. So that visual inspection is key to being able to identify those things early, fix them so that we don't have the damage done, and then you have to replace the little calipers. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Correct And training's real important because most of these technicians that are out there are familiar with us CamBreaks. More and more fleets are getting discs so they're becoming more familiar with it, but there's still a learning curve.
Speaker 1:So friction material selection is always a big part of SCAM brakes. When it comes to the disc brakes, how important is it to match friction to vocation?
Speaker 2:Super important. You won't necessarily want to use the same friction material for a line-haul application that's frequently just going down the highway as you would for a refuse application that might do a thousand stops a day. You have different requirements. Refuse doesn't want any noise. They have a higher duty cycle. They're going to see higher wheel-end temperatures and higher brake temperatures, especially at the interface, versus going down the highway. They don't necessarily need something that can handle that repetitive braking cycle.
Speaker 1:Okay, that makes sense. We're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor. We'll be right back. This episode of the Heavy Duty Parts Report is brought to you by Find It Parts, your ultimate destination for heavy-duty truck and trailer parts. Discover a vast range of parts at finditpartscom. Don't spend hours a day looking for parts. Instead, visit finditpartscom and get them right away. Parts availability and quality have a big influence on fleets and owner operators' total cost of operation. If they can't find a part, it means more downtime. If they install a low-quality part and it fails, it means even more costs like tow bills, hotels, meals for the driver and lost revenue. That's why we recommend Sampa. They manufacture a wide range of advanced parts for commercial vehicles. Their website has an intelligent product search engine and broad coverage of suspension, steering and fifth-wheel components. Expect more. Expect Sampa. Visit sampacom.
Speaker 1:Today We're back from our break. Before the break, we were talking about air disc brakes. We're talking about how they are being adopted more and more in the commercial vehicle space here in North America, And we were also talking about some of the key trends when it comes to preventative maintenance and making sure that they actually lead to lower total cost of operation for a fleet. Mike, let's talk a little bit about your company specifically. So maybe you could just give us a little bit of history first, and then we'll talk about some specific products. I've got a bunch of questions for you, Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the current company Bremscroll CV was born out of the Bremscroll Group. So Bremscroll, from a history standpoint, makes friction material for high-speed trains, makes friction material for fan clutch applications, golf carts, elevators and commercial vehicles. You name it. The only thing we never tailed into was the automotive market passenger car.
Speaker 2:Bremscroll CV, as it stands today, is a spinoff of Bremscroll North America. We separated the businesses so that Bremscroll CV could focus on the commercial vehicle market because we saw an opportunity to really take a narrow focus and expand our offerings in that marketplace to help our end user customers.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. So where are you located? Do you have multiple locations or do you cover the whole North America from one central place?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, We're based in Bartlett, Illinois, right outside of Chicago. We're responsible for everything in North America, Canada and the US, Mexico.
Speaker 1:Okay, fantastic, okay. So, when it comes to the products that you sell, just give us an overview of the product lineup, just so I make sure I haven't missed anything, yeah absolutely So.
Speaker 2:Our bread and butter is air to spray bats. We also are venturing into some other break-related components. We've been developing a rotor line, We have a caliper line and we're slowly rolling out a foundation drum brake line as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, perfect. So everything breaks. So okay, let's talk friction materials. So I didn't sell a lot of air disc brake in my career. It was mostly S-CAM And there was always like that classic, like we've got good, better, best. Does that exist with air disc brakes as well, or is that even real? Sure, it exists. I mean, it's a marketing term.
Speaker 2:All the way, if you know me in the market, i do not like the terminology at all. You know you could go out there with the value, the good, better, best. It's all salesman speak at the end of the day. So just like in drum brake linings with disc brakes, there are formulation specific to certain applications, and one of those formulations might just be a existing based material that somebody modified. And that's how friction material manufacturers, how we all come up with things. We might have one really good material. We don't usually go and start from scratch. We take an existing material and tweak it based on experience, whether that's in the lab or, more importantly, out in the field, to see how something behaves in an application. And you might have to go back two times, You may have to go back a couple hundred times before you get it right.
Speaker 1:Right, Now, one of the things I remember learning about friction material for S-cam brakes was that really the only way to lower the acquisition cost, the purchase price, was to take something out of the material. All things being equal, you know the labor and all of that, the shipping. That was pretty standard across the board, regardless of who you were buying from. So if you wanted to get cheaper brakes you had to take it out of something, out of the raw materials. Does that crossover to air disc brake?
Speaker 2:Sure, Yeah, I mean if from a manufacturing standpoint you know it's the same like S-cam brakes, Some people have a better manufacturing process than others and haven't been able to save money there and make it more cost effective to produce.
Speaker 2:But raw materials is definitely a very large portion of brake pads or drum brake linings. I mean, look, you have a steel or a cast iron backing plate metals of commodity. then you have lots of different raw ingredients that might go into a brake pad. Those are all commodities as well. Some of them are 10 cents or 20 cents a pound. Some of them cost $25 a pound. So it really just depends on what you put into the mixture and which percentage you put into the mixture that makes up that whole. But yeah, to answer your question, to reduce a upfront cost to all other things being equal, you'd have to take something out or put a lower cost material in there and take one of the more expensive materials out.
Speaker 1:Right, and as soon as you do that. To me, that translates into lower performance or increased wear. When it comes to brakes, they all have to meet the standard of stopping distances, but the question is for how long before they need to be changed. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Correct. I mean the aftermarket. the only true requirement is an FMVS-121 test. There is no RSD as it stands today There's no requirement for the aftermarket. It's a no-we only specification. Now that doesn't mean a supplier in the aftermarket can't go and do the same type of stop distance tests. They certainly can.
Speaker 1:Many don't Right, many don't. Yeah, that's the scary part. Is the friction material on an air disc brake system basically the exact same friction material in an SKM, just reformulated in a different shape and size? What's the differences?
Speaker 2:You have a disc brake versus a drum brake application. One is inherently different in design than the other. Without getting into specifics of what goes in the materials, you do have carryovers in terms of the types of raw materials that go into them, But philosophy-wise a disc brake and a drum brake are different. So when we develop materials, what we develop for a drum brake lining material is a different development path than what we develop for a disc brake material.
Speaker 1:So I know that in SKM brakes one of the big goals and how you can get better performance really is how quickly can the friction material dissipate the heat? That's a big part of it. What are the differences in actual performance characteristics between the two systems when it comes to things like heat and it comes to stopping and all of that? Let's just give me a little more there. I want to learn because I don't know as much about the air disc as I do about SKM.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say, and you touched on a lot of them. So I'd say there's two really big fallacies in the marketplace. The first is heat dissipation. Friction material for all intensive purposes is an insulator. If you look at a brake pad, you have almost an inch of material. You have steel backing plate. The heat at the interface between the pad and the rotor is going to find its way out faster through that gray iron rotor than it is through that brake pad. You can put things in a brake pad or in a drum brake lining. That could help from a heat transfer standpoint. But generally speaking the heat is transferring through that drum or through that disc. When you talk about disc brakes, that's what a vent is for. You've seen disc brakes with solid disc and you've seen disc brakes with vents. Most stuff that's out there in the commercial vehicle market has a vent.
Speaker 2:The intention of the vent is it draws air in and through centrifugal force is effectively throwing the heat out. That's why you need the speed of the vehicle to draw that air in. When you're going down the highway, when we're talking about a vocational application, start-stop application, a thousand stops, maybe they're going 10 miles an hour. They don't get the same type of airflow into that wheel end. Consequently, they have higher wheel attempts. Heat is the enemy of all brakes. Then I say the other thing, that the second fallacy we hear all the time is well, if I want the pad to live or I want the rotor to live, one's got to give, i've got to give something up.
Speaker 2:In a lot of cases that's true, but you can get to a point in which a friction material manufacturer has been able to develop a material that will give you both Can extend that rotor life and can also extend that pad life at the same time.
Speaker 2:And there's two real basic philosophies on making friction material. One is abrasive where the pad is wearing the rotor and one is called adherent. Basically it's putting down what we call the film transfer layer. And that film transfer layer think of it as a protectant and the pad is running on that interface. And so when you switch from one brake pad to another brake pad and you put it on an existing rotor, you have to give that brake pad time to seed into that rotor. You have to give it time to kind of condition that rotor. And there is a point in time where that rotor is too far gone and that's not going to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. So what makes a rotor warp? We've all had that experience. You get into an older vehicle, maybe, and you hit those brakes and you get oh man, there's a lot of shake. What's going on there? What has happened? Is it just that the rotor perhaps is a poor or low quality steel, or is there something else going on there? Yeah, I mean it could be that It could be heat.
Speaker 2:So there's different factors that contribute to it. You don't see a lot of warping in commercial vehicle rotors per se. More what you're going to see in rotor effects is you're going to start seeing heat checks that are going to potentially turn into cracks. And when you start talking about roadside violations that CSA can actually see, they can see cracks and they can see top edges of brake pads, for instance. They no longer have the ability to really see the whole entire brake pad surface or anything in that nature. the brake pads are a little harder to inspect.
Speaker 1:Right. But hey, brake week is coming up August 20th to 26th and those are the things they're going to look for. If you're running air disc brakes correct, correct, yeah, anything visual, well, that's really great. So when you walk into a fleet and, let's say, you're helping one of your customers to sell that fleet, what are the two or three things that you're going to look for right away to help decide what application or what product you're going to recommend so that it matches product application?
Speaker 2:Sure, We want to understand how the fleet operates, first and foremost, what they do with their vehicles. We want to understand a baseline, the existing brake pad and rotor combination that they had. What kind of life were they getting? And I say combination for a reason If you were using OE pad, OE rotor and you got, say, 400,000 miles of life on that pad and then you kept the OE pad and you went to an aftermarket rotor, the life may not be the same.
Speaker 2:And so when you start playing around with different materials whether you're talking frankly, anything but brakes you don't want to change pad and rotor at the same time. And so when we'll go into a fleet and we'll talk with the fleet, even though we offer all these products, we won't say, yes, change pad and rotor at the same time. We'll say let's take one variable first, let's prove it, let's show you what happens, and then we'll talk about the other component. Because if you were to put both components on right out of the gate, then potentially, if something didn't work as well as you want it, life-wise, you don't know what contributed to it Right Too many variables.
Speaker 2:Correct, yeah, so the other things we're looking for is what's the baseline? What do they do with their fleet? What kind of issues have they experienced? And that's a hard question to ask, especially with AirDisk, because they don't have a lot of experience. The biggest thing we run into is when fleets have switched over from S-Camp to disk. A lot of the manufacturers pushed up discs and said, oh, you're going to get this great life on Tractor, this great life on Trailer, and they haven't seen anywhere near that.
Speaker 2:You also have one other factor that's contributing to all this is all the copper-free materials. A lot of the OE materials not all of them, a lot of them still have some level of copper. Most of the materials in the aftermarket that we run across are copper-free. You really only have two states that are pushing the copper-free mandate at the moment, but potentially it expands across the United States. We offer copper and copper-free because copper is a really good material from a high-temperature application standpoint. It really helps with life. I will tell you that We have to look at each fleet on a case-by-case basis. They all operate differently, whether they're running their vehicles just an eight-hour day or they're running slip-seat, for instance, and continually running their vehicles of 24 hours a day.
Speaker 2:So, they all have different issues.
Speaker 1:My name is Jamie Irvin and you've been listening to the Heavy Duty Parts Report. We've had a chance to talk about air disc brakes today in depth. I just want to thank you so much for sharing all of this information, Mike. I really appreciate it. If people want to learn more about your company, what's your website? Sure, yeah, they can go to bremscrollscvcom and it's B-R-E-M-S-K-E-R-L-C-Vcom.
Speaker 1:Nice, easy one to spell. We'll make sure that the links are in the show notes so that you can just do a one-click and go check them out. Mike, again, thank you so much for taking some time to talk to us about air disc brake. I really appreciate you coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me how'd you do.