I bought my Taurus second hand two years ago and when test driving it noticed the steering wheel shook. The previous owners told me the ball joint, idler arm and tie rod needed to be replaced and so knocked a grand off the Blue Book value. $800 later and with new tires to boot she drove smooth as silk. Over the course of a year while breaking the steering wheel started to shake. At first just a little bit and much later quite a lot, especially at low speeds. I’m not completely without repair skills so I replaced the front break pads, which seemed to cure it for awhile, but then it started to shake again. I went to replace the break pads again and found something that quite surprised me. The pads are free to travel on both sides of the rotor but yet it was only the inside pad that was worn on for both wheels, and worn far more than it should have been. Deciding just to put the new pads on anyway, the problem was fixed for awhile, 6 months later here I am with the steering wheel shaking again and at a loss to explain why. WTF?
Details can be important on evaluating something like this. Under exactly what conditions does it vibrate?
Steering wheel wobble at low speeds is usually from an out-of-round tire.
Steering wheel wobble at high speeds is often from steering linkage play, such as a tie rod end.
Steering wheel wobble and vibration at 60-65 mph is typically from wheel imbalance.
Steering wheel wobble when braking is almost always from warped brake rotors.
Uneven pad wear such as you describe is usually from stiff or seized caliper guide pins.
Sounds like it’s time to take the car in for a real brake job. As **Gary T ** said, grossly uneven pad wear is not normal - I’ll bet just about anything that you didn’t clean and lube the caliper pins with high-temp brake grease.
You’re looking at needing new pads, new rotors, and possibly new calipers. It’s probably cheaper to buy new quality rebuilt calipers than to have the shop gobble up labor hours dinking around with cleaning and inspecting the parts.
If the calipers get replaced, you may as well have the brake fluid changed.
The outside of the rotors are rusting.
My wife’s Taurus did the exact same thing. The brake calipers are suppose to float on the mounting pins, your’s are not. I found the caliper mounting pins were bent preventing the calipers from traveling fully inboard and outboard. Install new caliper mounting pins, install them with a light layer of white grease and that should fix your problem. I would replace the pads and double check the rotors to make sure they are still within specs.
White grease can break down from the heat generated by braking operation. Much wiser to use a high-temperature grease, as gotpasswords suggested. I favor Sta-Lube Synthetic Brake Caliper Grease.