Why Traild Ceramic Brake Pads Don't Need Shims

Pull the old pads off almost any UTV and you'll find a thin metal plate on the back of each one. That's the shim. Open a box of Traild ceramic pads and you won't find one. We left it out on purpose.

What shims are for

Shims are there to cut noise. Braking makes the pad and rotor vibrate, and when that vibration reaches the caliper you hear it as squeal. The shim sits between the pad and the caliper piston and soaks some of it up.

That works fine on a car that spends its life on pavement. A side-by-side doesn't.

What happens on the trail

Ride a few miles of dusty two-track and fine dirt gets into every part of the caliper, including the gap between the pad and the shim. Once it's packed in there, the shim isn't damping anything. It's grinding grit against the back of the pad every time you brake. The squeal comes back, usually with some scraping on top.

We put the noise control in the friction material instead. Our ceramic compound is formulated to run quiet by itself, so there's no extra layer behind the pad and nowhere for dirt to collect.

Leave your old shims out

You don't need to reuse your original shims with our pads, and we don't expect you to. On some machines it won't even work. On the CF Moto U10 Pro, we added pad material to take up the space the shim used to fill, so if you put the stock shim back in, the pad won't fit the caliper right.

If a pad feels tight going in, check for an old shim left behind. Everything else about the install stays the same: follow your service manual for hardware, torque, and bed-in.

Shop Traild ceramic brake pads for your machine and leave the old shims on the bench.